TeX Live documentation

For 2008 pretesters, documentation for the upcoming 2008 release is available:

• TeX Live 2008 Guide (pdf);
• TeX Live Installer (install-tl) overview;
• TeX Live Manager (tlmgr) overview;
• comprehensive list of documentation links.

The remainder of the links on this page refer to TeX Live 2007.

After you obtain the TeX Live distribution, please read the general documentation for TeX Live, including installation instructions for Unix and Windows. For MacOSX, we recommend installing MacTeX.

The TeX Live guide is also available online:

• English documentation - HTML.
• English documentation - PDF.
• Other languages: Simplified Chinese, Czech/Slovak, French, German, Polish, Russian.

If you don't care to read documentation, and just want to install everything, try this quick Unix install recipe, and/or installation for Windows, and/or MacTeX for MacOSX.

Additional manuals

Online links to additional documentation for some of the basic components of the TeX system:
web2c - tds - pdftex - kpathsea - dvips.

Of course, TeX Live also includes hundreds of manuals of all kinds (including all the above) - whatever documentation the package and program authors provided, mostly in the texmf*/doc subdirectories. The top-level doc.html file in the distribution has a simple listing of most of them.

Flavors of TeX Live

TeX Live comes in two variants:

live (DVD)

can be run directly from the distribution media, or installed to hard disk. This is the one recommended for general use.

inst (CD)

includes all the same programs and packages, but for only three architectures (see below), so it fits on a standard CD. Also, the data is compressed, so it can only be installed, not run live. The only reason to use this is to burn a physical CD.

Supported systems

The following systems are supported in this year's release, in the live distribution:

• alpha-linux (HP Alpha GNU/Linux)
• hppa-hpux (HP-UX)
• i386-darwin (x86 MacOSX)
• i386-freebsd (x86 FreeBSD)
• i386-linux (x86 GNU/Linux)
• i386-openbsd (x86 OpenBSD)
• i386-solaris (x86 Solaris)
• mips-irix (SGI IRIX)
• powerpc-aix (IBM RS/6000 AIX)
• powerpc-darwin (PowerPC MacOSX; bash.dmg available for bootstrap)
• powerpc-linux (PowerPC GNU/Linux)
• sparc-linux (Sparc GNU/Linux)
• sparc-solaris (Sun Sparc Solaris)
• win32 (32-bit Windows, i.e., 9X and later)
• x86_64-linux (x86 64-bit GNU/Linux)

In the inst distribution, only i386-linux, powerpc-darwin, and win32 binaries are included.

Finally, Nokia 770 binaries are available online, thanks to Ludger Humber. It should work to simply install TL from another system and put these into the resulting bin/ directory.

install-tl translations

As of 2008, the messages in the TeX Live installer, when running in GUI mode only (we want to keep the text mode installer as simple as possible), are available in various languages. If your language is not available and you want to help by providing a translation:

• copy the perltk-en.sample file to perltk-LL, where LL is your language code;
• put perltk-LL in your tlpkg/installer/lang/ directory;
• translate the strings;
• run install-tl gui to test it (you can use the option -lang LL to test independently of the system LC_MESSAGES setting);
• email tex-live@tug.org with the new file.

Thanks.