2 Structure and contents of the CD-ROM

The important CD-ROM top-level directories are listed below.

bin

The TeX family programs, arranged in separate platform directories.

Books

Examples related to some books about TeX.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions, in English, French, and German.

MacOSX

Support programs for MacOSX users

info

Documentation in GNU ‘info’ format for the TeX system.

man

Documentation in the form of Unix man pages for the TeX system.

setupw32

directory contains material for installation and use under Windows (see section 4 on p. 31).

source

The source of all programs, including the main Web2c TeX and METAFONT distributions. These are stored in a bzip2-compressed tar archive.

support

Various bits of TeX-related software which are not installed by default, support programs, and a complete distribution of Ghostscript version 7.05. You can find here some other programs (editors, TeX shells), which are usually absent from Windows installations, dedicated for beginners. They can be installed with the TeXSetup.exe Windows installation program.

texmf

The main support tree of macros, fonts and documentation;

usergrps

Material about TeX User Groups.

There are also two installation scripts for Unix systems, install-cd.sh and install-pkg.sh; we discuss them on in section 3 on p. 12.

2.1 Packages and collections

The collections add functionality to a TeX system. One of them, named ‘tex-basic’, is necessary for almost all TeX tasks, and two others, called ‘tex-latex’ and ‘tex-pdftex’ are highly recommended for most users. All others are optional. The collections (defined by XML files in texmf/tpm/collections) and their short descriptions are listed below.

tex-basic

These files are regarded as basic for any TeX system, covering plain TeX macros, Computer Modern fonts, and configuration for common drivers.

tex-bibtexextra

Additional, extensive libraries of BibTeX styles and bibliographies.

tex-chemistry

Essential chemistry

tex-context

Hans Hagen’s powerful macro package, ConText

tex-documentation

Assorted useful documentation and guides

tex-etex

Support files for an extended TeX 

tex-extrabin

Various useful, but non-essential, support programs. Includes programs and macros for texinfo system; programs for dvi file manipulation, etc.

tex-fontbin

Programs for conversion between font formats, testing fonts (virtual fonts stuff, .gf and .pk manipulation, mft, fontinst, etc.)

tex-fontsextra

All sorts of extra fonts

tex-formatsextra

A collection of TeX ‘formats’, ie large-scale macro packages designed to be dumped into .fmt file

tex-games

Setups for typesetting various board games, including chess

tex-genericextra

This is a mixed bag of macro packages and fonts which do not seem to belong elsewhere

tex-htmlxml

Packages to convert LaTeX to XML/HTML, and typeset XML/SGML

tex-langafrican

Support for some African scripts

tex-langarmenian

Essential armenian

tex-langcjk

Essential CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) macros and fonts

tex-langcroatian

Essential croatian

tex-langcyrillic

Fonts and macro packages to typeset Cyrillic texts.

tex-langczechslovak

Pick this if you want Czech/Slovak fonts and other packages

tex-langdanish

Essential Danish

tex-langdutch

Essential Dutch

tex-langfinnish

Essential Finnish

tex-langfrench

Essential French

tex-langgerman

Essential German

tex-langgreek

Essential Greek

tex-langhungarian

Essential Hungarian

tex-langindic

Essential Indic

tex-langitalian

Essential Italian

tex-langlatin

Essential Latin

tex-langmanju

Essential Manju

tex-langmongolian

Essential mongolian

tex-langnorwegian

Essential Norwegian

tex-langother

Other languages

tex-langpolish

Pick this if you want Polish fonts and other packages

tex-langportuguese

Essential Portuguese

tex-langspanish

Essential Spanish

tex-langswedish

Essential Swedish

tex-langtibetan

Fonts and support for typesetting Tibetan

tex-langukenglish

Essential UK English

tex-langvietnamese

Essential Vietnamese

tex-latex

These packages are either mandated by the core LaTeX team, or very commonly recommended

tex-latexextra

A large collection of add-on packages for LaTeX 

tex-mathextra

Extra math

tex-metapost

MetaPost (and MetaFont) drawing packages

tex-music

Music typesetting packages

tex-omega

Omega, a 16-bit extended TeX by John Plaice and Yannis Haralambous

tex-pdftex

Support files for Han The Thanh’s variant of TeX which can generate PDF output

tex-pictures

Essential graphics

tex-plainextra

Plain TeX extra macros

tex-psfonts

Essential psfonts

tex-psutils

Utilities to manipulate PostScript files

tex-publishers

Essential publishers

tex-t1utils

Utilities to manipulate Type1 fonts

tex-texbooks

Examples and other material from various books about TeX/LaTeX.

tex-theses

Macro packages from various Universities for their thesis styles

tex-ttfutils

Utilities to manipulate TrueType fonts

win32-support

You can choose individual tools from this collection. There are many TeX oriented editors, graphics files toolsets, etc.

The directory texmf/tpm/packages contains lists of all files in each package (used by the installation programs).