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 texmf-doc/doc/english/ hierarchy, in both html and pdf formats. Translations to other languages are also available under texmf-doc/doc/*.
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, and 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 configuration is now performed with the tlmgr (TeX Live Package Manager) script, which likewise has both GUI and text modes.
Most of the documentation can be viewed online, before the TeX system is installed. To read it most conveniently, you will need to have a browser (such as Firefox) for HTML documents, and a PDF reader (such as gv or xpdf or Sumatra PDF (all free alternatives to Acrobat) for PDF documents.
Finally, a few related web pages, for your reference. These are not included in TeX Live: