10 Obtaining software

10.1 CTAN

CTAN is the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network, a network of ftp servers where you can get (almost) every thing that is related to TeX. CTAN has three backbones

Germany: ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/
UK: ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/
USA: ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/

and several mirrors. You can obtain a list of the current CTAN mirrors as
ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/CTAN.sites

Many of the servers (and at least the backbones in Germany and the UK) support compression on the fly, i.e. you can download the contents of a directory and all its subdirectories as a .zip of tar.gz file. Simply add the suffix .zip of .tar.gz to the URL of the directory to download.

There is also a searchable index for CTAN at
http://ctan.tug.org/cgi-bin/ctan-web-search
and
http://www.dante.de/cgi-bin/ctan-index

10.2 Where to get fpTeX

fpTeX is available from CTAN in the directory :
ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/systems/win32/fptex/
or from
ftp://ftp.ese-metz.fr/pub/tex/win32/
which is mirrored daily by the CTAN backbones in their systems/win32/fptex directory.

The fptex directory contains also additional tools like psutils, gnutools, perl and the files necessary to set up LaTeX2HTML.

Beta versions of fpTeX are available from
ftp://ftp.ese-metz.fr/pub/tex/win32-beta/

10.3 Documentation on LaTeX

You will find a nice free documentation on LaTeX with the title The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e on CTAN in the directory :
ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/info/lshort.

This introduction is available as dvi, Postscript and pdf file. There is also a German version in the directory :
ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/info/LaTeX2e-Kurzbeschreibung.

Of course, there are various books available on LaTeX. For beginners, you might take a closer look to
L. LAMPORT LaTeX: A Documentation Preparation System User's Guide and Reference Manual

H. KOPKA and P.W. DALY A guide to LaTeX2e

For more advanced users, the following books will be of valuable help:
M. GOOSSENS, F. MITTELBACH and A. SAMARIN The LaTeX companion

M. GOOSSENS, S. RAHTZ and F. MITTELBACH The LaTeX graphics companion

10.4 Important LaTeX macros on CTAN

LaTeX-base: ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/base/
tools package: ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/packages/tools/
graphics package: ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/packages/graphics/
psnfss package: ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/packages/psnfss/
babel package: ftp.//ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/packages/babel/

Various other LaTeX packages are available from CTAN in the directories
ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/
or
ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/other/

10.5 Info-Zip

The Info-Zip archive tools zip and unzip for compression and uncompression are available from the Info-Zip homepage

http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip
or
http://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/ftp/mirror/infozip/
(European mirror)

or from CTAN in the directory

ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/tools/infozip/
There is also a GUI based variant of zip/unzip called wiz in the same directory.

10.6 Ghostscript and GSView

You can obtain ghostscript (a Postscript interpreter) and GSView (a user-friendly frontend for ghostscript) from the ghostscript homepage

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html

or from CTAN in the directory

ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/support/Ghostscript/Aladdin/ (ghostscript)
and
ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/support/Ghostscript/rjl/ (GSView)

You will need the files

gs550w32.zip
gs550ini.zip
gs550fn1.zip (all from the Aladdin directory) and
gv26w32.zip (from the rjl directory)

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