TeX Live

TeX Live is an easy way to get up and running with the TeX document production system. It provides a comprehensive TeX system with binaries for most flavors of Unix, including GNU/Linux, and also Windows. It includes all the major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts that are free software, including support for many languages around the world.

• How to acquire TeX Live: download, on DVD, other methods.
• Documentation and mailing lists.
• Highlights of changes in the current release, and known issues.
• Quick install for Unix; installation and release notes for Windows; for MacOSX, see the MacTeX distribution.
• Portable (USB and DVD) usage of TeX Live.
• Installing/updating packages after installation.

• TeX Live licensing, and integration with operating system distributions.
• Development source repository, and building the sources.
• How you can help.

• Current release: TeX Live 2011 is available through Internet and on DVD.

Some starting points for actually using TeX are in this introduction to the TeX world.

Plan for TeX Live 2012:
2apr: sources committed, builds begin.
15apr: sources stable except for major bugs.
10may: tlnet (and TL'11) frozen, tlpretest starts, CTAN updates continue there.
2jun: CTAN updates only on request.
7jun: complete freeze for final build, no more updates, final doc tweaks, always more testing.
10jun: make final images for the TeX Collection DVD.
August?: delivery of DVDs to members.

TeX Live has been developed since 1996 by collaboration between the TeX user groups. TeX Live was originally perpetrated by Sebastian Rahtz. Present miscreants are Karl Berry, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard, Norbert Preining, Peter Breitenlohner, Reinhard Kotucha, Siep Kroonenberg, Staszek Wawrykiewicz, Tomasz Trzeciak, Vladimir Volovich, and a cast of thousands.