TeX Live Windows installation

The same TeX Live installer is used for Windows as for other platforms, so the general documentation applies.

When successful, the installer does some special things on Windows:

• Adds a TeX Live submenu.
• Adds the directory of TeX Live Windows binaries to the search path:
  • if it detects another TeX in the search path already, the new TL directory is added at the beginning of the path;
  • otherwise, the new binary directory is added at the end of the path.
• Adds a few shortcuts on the desktop (feel free to remove any or all of them).
  • The TeXworks editor is provided for composing TeX documents.
  • You can drag PostScript and PDF files onto the PS_View shortcut for viewing. (To view DVI files, use the dviout< program from the menu.)

If you want to share a TeX Live installation among several Windows machines, see the w32client information.

Security

It is especially important to be careful when processing untrusted documents on Windows, because in general Windows finds programs in the current directory before anything else, regardless of the search path. This opens up a wide variety of possible attacks.

Thus, we recommend checking for suspicious files in the current directory, especially executables (binaries or scripts). Ordinarily they should not be present, and definitely should not normally be created by merely processing a document.

Although the core TeX programs are robust, to the best of our knowledge, third-party programs may not reach the same level. For maximum safety, we recommend using a new subdirectory for processing.

Administration

Multiple TeX distributions: only one TeX distribution can be active at a time, because all the TeX distributions use the search path to find their programs. This means that to switch from one TeX to another, e.g., between TeX Live and MiKTeX if you have both installed, you must (at least) change the search path.

Administrator privileges on Vista and Windows 7: even when running as administrator, if you want to install for all users, right-click install-tl.bat and select ‘Run as administrator’. The same is needed when running tlmgr (TeX Live Package Manager).