2 Structure of TeX Live
The main two installation scripts for Unix and Mac OS X are install-tl.sh and install-pkg.sh. We discuss
them in section 3 on p. 13. Here, we describe the structure and contents of TeX Live.
2.1 Multiple distributions: live, inst, demo
As of 2003, space limitations of CD-ROM format have forced us to divide TeX Live into three distributions, as
follows.
-
live
- a complete, runnable system on DVD; it is too large for CD-ROM. (The DVD also includes a snapshot
of the CTAN repository, completely independent of TeX Live.)
-
inst(allable)
- a complete system on CD; in order to make it fit, we had to compress everything we could.
Therefore, it is not possible to run TeX directly from the installable CD, you have to install it to disk
(hence its name). Installation is described in subsequent sections.
-
demo
- a live system runnable directly from CD; in order to make this fit, we omitted the very large
collection of CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) language support, support for typesetting music,
some less-commonly used fonts, and included executables only for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows
systems.
You can tell which type of distribution you’re in by looking for a 00type.TL file in this top-level
directory.
2.2 Top level directories
Here is a brief listing and description of the top level directories in the TeX Live distribution.
bin | The TeX system programs, arranged by platform. |
Books | Examples from some of the books about TeX (see Books/README). |
FAQ | Current versions of major FAQ collections. |
info | A few manuals in GNU Info format, where available. |
MacOSX | Supporting software for Mac OS X (see section 5 on p. 32). |
man | Unix man pages. |
source | The source of all programs, including the main Web2C TeX and METAFONT
distributions. These are stored in a bzip2-compressed tar archive. |
support | assorted auxiliary packages and programs. These are not installed by default. This
includes Ghostscript, netpbm, and assorted editors and TeX shells. |
texmf | root of installed packages, fonts, config files, etc. |
usergrps | Material about a few of the TeX user groups. (Visit http://tug.org/usergroups.html for
a current list.) |
xemtex | The XEmacs editor and other support programs for Windows (see section 6.3 on
p. 38). These programs generally come pre-installed on Unix systems, or are at least
easy to compile. |
|
2.3 Extensions to TeX
TeX Live contains three extended versions of TeX:
-
e-TeX
- adds a small but powerful set of new primitives (related to macro expansion, character scanning,
classes of marks, additional debugging features, and more) and the TeX--XE T extensions for
bidirectional typesetting. In default mode, e-TeX is 100% compatible with ordinary TeX. See
texmf/doc/etex/base/etex_man.pdf. e-TeX is now the default for LaTeX and pdfLaTeX.
-
pdfTeX
- writes Acrobat PDF format as well as DVI. The LaTeX hyperref package has an option ‘pdftex’
which turns on all the program features. See texmf/doc/pdftex/pdftex-l.pdf and texmf/
doc/pdftex/base/example.tex.
-
(Omega) - based on Unicode (16-bit characters), thus supports working with almost all the world’s
scripts simultaneously. It also supports so-called ‘
Translation Processes’ (OTPs), for performing
complex transformations on arbitrary input. See texmf/doc/omega/base/doc-1.8.tex (not
completely up-to-date).
2.4 Other notable programs in TeX Live
Here are a few other commonly-used programs included in TeX Live:
-
bibtex
- bibliography support.
-
makeindex
- index support.
-
dvips
- convert DVI to PostScript.
-
xdvi
- DVI previewer for the X Window System.
-
dvilj
- HP LaserJet driver.
-
dv2dt, dt2dv
- convert DVI to/from plain text.
-
dviconcat, dviselect
- cut and paste pages from DVI files.
-
dvipdfm
- convert DVI to PDF, an alternative approach to pdfTeX (mentioned above). See the ps4pdf and
pdftricks packages for still more alternatives.
-
psselect, psnup, . . .
- PostScript utilities.
-
lacheck
- LaTeX syntax checker.
-
texexec
- ConTeXt and PDF processor.
-
tex4ht
- TeX to HTML converter.