The TeX Live software distribution offers a complete TeX system for a variety of Unix, Macintosh, Windows and other platforms. It encompasses programs for editing, typesetting, previewing and printing of TeX documents in many different languages, and a large collection of TeX macros and font libraries.
The distribution includes extensive general documentation about TeX, as well as the documentation for the included software packages.
For licensing information, please see the top-level LICENSE.TL and LICENSE.CTAN text files.
We strongly recommend that you read the TeX Live Guide before undertaking the installation. It includes step-by-step instructions, a description of the top-level directories, and more.
English versions of the Guide are in the full distribution (for example, on the DVD) in the texmf-doc/doc/english/ hierarchy, in both html and pdf formats. Translations to other languages are also available under texmf-doc/doc/*.
We also provide a list of links to the available PDF and HTML documentation for the included packages and programs.
If you are installing from the Internet, the above links won't work. In that case, you can view the TeX Live documentation on the Internet.
For a list of the most important changes in this year's release, see the Release history section at the end of the documentation.
The installation script is now named install-tl (that's install-tl.bat on Windows), and it has both GUI (default on Windows) and text (default on everything else) operation modes. You can force one or the other with the options -gui and -no-gui, respectively.
Post-installation package updates and other configurations are now performed with the tlmgr (TeX Live Package Manager) script, which likewise has both GUI and text modes.
You can give the command-line option --help to both install-tl and tlmgr for an overview. See the documentation links above for (much) more information.
Finally, a few related web pages, for your reference. These are not included in TeX Live: