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 (Omega)
based on Unicode (16-bit characters), thus supports working with almost all the world’s scripts simultaneously. It also supports so-called ‘Omega 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.