The TEX Live Guide
TEX Live 2009

Karl Berry, editor
http://tug.org/texlive/

October 2009

Contents

1 Introduction
 1.1 TEX Live and the TEX Collection
 1.2 Operating system support
 1.3 Basic installation of TEX Live
 1.4 Security considerations
 1.5 Getting help
2 Overview of TEX Live
 2.1 The TEX Collection: TEX Live, proTEXt, MacTEX
 2.2 Top level TEX Live directories
 2.3 Overview of the predefined texmf trees
 2.4 Extensions to TEX
 2.5 Other notable programs in TEX Live
 2.6 Fonts in TEX Live
3 Installation
 3.1 Starting the installer
  3.1.1 Unix
  3.1.2 MacOSX
  3.1.3 Windows
  3.1.4 Cygwin
  3.1.5 The text installer
  3.1.6 The expert graphical installer
  3.1.7 The simple wizard installer
 3.2 Running the installer
  3.2.1 Binary systems menu (Unix only)
  3.2.2 Selecting what is going to be installed
  3.2.3 Directories
  3.2.4 Options
  3.2.5 Set up for running from DVD (text mode only)
 3.3 Command-line install-tl options
  3.3.1 The -repository option
 3.4 Post-install actions
  3.4.1 Windows
  3.4.2 If symlinks were created
  3.4.3 Environment variables for Unix
  3.4.4 Environment variables: global configuration
  3.4.5 Font configuration for XeTEX
  3.4.6 When running from DVD
  3.4.7 ConTEXt Mark IV
  3.4.8 Integrating local and personal macros
  3.4.9 Integrating third-party fonts
 3.5 Testing the installation
 3.6 Links for additional downloadable software
4 Network installations
5 Maximally portable TEX Live on DVD and USB
6 tlmgr: Managing your installation
 6.1 tlmgr GUI mode
 6.2 Sample tlmgr command-line invocations
7 Notes on Windows
 7.1 Windows-specific features
 7.2 Additional software included on Windows
 7.3 User Profile is Home
 7.4 The Windows registry
 7.5 Windows permissions
8 A user’s guide to Web2C
 8.1 Kpathsea path searching
  8.1.1 Path sources
  8.1.2 Config files
  8.1.3 Path expansion
  8.1.4 Default expansion
  8.1.5 Brace expansion
  8.1.6 Subdirectory expansion
  8.1.7 List of special characters and their meaning: a summary
 8.2 Filename databases
  8.2.1 The filename database
  8.2.2 kpsewhich: Standalone path searching
  8.2.3 Examples of use
  8.2.4 Debugging actions
 8.3 Runtime options
9 Acknowledgements
10 Release history
 10.1 Past
  10.1.1 2003
  10.1.2 2004
  10.1.3 2005
  10.1.4 2006–2007
  10.1.5 2008
 10.2 Present
 10.3 Future

1 Introduction

1.1 TEX Live and the TEX Collection

This document describes the main features of the TEX Live software distribution — TEX and related programs for GNU/Linux and other Unix flavors, Mac OS X, and Windows systems.

You may have acquired TEX Live by downloading, or on the TEX Collection DVD, which TEX user groups distribute among their members, or in other ways. Section 2.1 briefly describes the contents of the DVD. Both TEX Live and the TEX Collection are cooperative efforts by the TEX user groups. This document mainly describes TEX Live itself.

TEX Live includes executables for TEX, LaTeX2e, ConTEXt, Metafont, MetaPost, BibTeX and many other programs; an extensive collection of macros, fonts and documentation; and support for typesetting in many different scripts from around the world.

For a brief summary of the major changes in this edition of TEX Live, see the end of the document, section 10 (p. 72).

1.2 Operating system support

TEX Live contains binaries for many Unix-based architectures, including GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. There are also Cygwin binaries. The included sources can be compiled on platforms for which we do not have binaries.

As to Windows: only Windows 2000 and later are supported. Windows 9x, ME and NT have been dropped. Because of this change, Windows requires much less special treatment compared to the Unix systems. There are no special 64-bit executables for Windows, but the 32-bit executables should run on 64-bit systems.

See section 2.1 for alternate solutions for Windows and Mac OS X.

1.3 Basic installation of TEX Live

You can install TEX Live either from DVD or over the Internet. The net installer itself is small, and downloads everything requested from the Internet.

The DVD installer lets you install to a local disk, but you can also run TEX Live directly from the DVD (or from a DVD image, if your system supports that). Installation is described in later sections, but here is a quick start:

1.4 Security considerations

To the best of our knowledge, the core TEX programs themselves are (and always have been) extremely robust. However, the contributed programs in TEX Live may not reach the same level, despite everyone’s best efforts. As always, you should be careful when running programs on untrusted input; for maximum safety, use a new subdirectory.

This need for care is especially urgent on Windows, since 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. We have closed many holes, but undoubtedly some remain, especially with third-party programs.

Finally, TEX (and its companion programs) are able to write files when processing documents, a feature that can also be abused in a wide variety of ways. Again, processing unknown documents in a new subdirectory is the safest bet.

1.5 Getting help

The TEX community is active and friendly, and most serious questions end up getting answered. However, the support is informal, done by volunteers and casual readers, so it’s especially important that you do your homework before asking. (If you prefer guaranteed commercial support, you can forgo TEX Live completely and purchase a vendor’s system; http://tug.org/interest.html#vendors has a list.)

Here is a list of resources, approximately in the order we recommend using them:

Getting Started
If you are new to TEX, the web page http://tug.org/begin.html gives a brief introduction to the system.
TEX FAQ
The TEX FAQ is a huge compendium of answers to all sorts of questions, from the most basic to the most arcane. It is included on TEX Live in texmf-dist/doc/generic/FAQ-en/html/index.html, and is available on the Internet through http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq. Please check here first.
TEX Catalogue
If you are looking for a specific package, font, program, etc., the TEX Catalogue is the place to look. It is a huge collection of all TEX-related items. See http://www.ctan.org/help/Catalogue/.
TEX Web Resources
The web page http://tug.org/interest.html has many TEX-related links, in particular for numerous books, manuals, and articles on all aspects of the system.
support archives
The two principal support forums are the Usenet newsgroup news:comp.text.tex and the mailing list texhax@tug.org. Their archives have years of past questions and answers for your searching pleasure, via http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/topics and http://tug.org/mail-archives/texhax, respectively. And a general web search, for example on http://google.com, never hurts.
asking questions
If you cannot find an answer, you can post to comp.text.tex through Google or your newsreader, or to texhax@tug.org through email. But before you post, please read this FAQ entry, to maximize your chances of getting a useful answer: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=askquestion.
TEX Live support
If you want to report a bug or have suggestions or comments on the TEX Live distribution, installation, or documentation, the mailing list is tex-live@tug.org. However, if your question is about how to use a particular program included in TEX Live, please write to that program’s maintainer or mailing list. Often running a program with the --help option will provide a bug reporting address.

The other side of the coin is helping others who have questions. Both comp.text.tex and texhax are open to anyone, so feel free to join, start reading, and help out where you can.

2 Overview of TEX Live

This section describes the contents of TEX Live and the TEX Collection of which it is a part.

2.1 The TEX Collection: TEX Live, proTEXt, MacTEX

The TEX Collection DVD comprises the following:

TEX Live
A complete TEX system which can be run live or installed to disk. Its home page is http://tug.org/texlive/.
MacTEX
for Mac OS X, this adds a native Mac OS X installer and other Mac applications to TEX Live. Its home page is http://tug.org/mactex/.
proTEXt
An enhancement of the MiKTEX distribution for Windows, proTEXt adds a few extra tools to MiKTEX, and simplifies installation. It is entirely independent of TEX Live, and has its own installation instructions. The proTEXt home page is http://tug.org/protext.
CTAN
A snapshot of the CTAN repository (http://www.ctan.org).
texmf-extra
A directory with assorted additional packages.

CTAN, protext, and texmf-extra do not necessarily follow the same copying conditions as TEX Live, so be careful when redistributing or modifying.

2.2 Top level TEX Live directories

Here is a brief listing and description of the top level directories in the TEX Live distribution. On the TEX Collection DVD, the entire TEX Live hierarchy is in a subdirectory texlive, not at the top level of the disc.

bin

The TEX system programs, arranged by platform.

readme-*.dir

Quick overview and useful links for TEX Live, in various languages, in both HTML and plain text.

source

The source to all included programs, including the main Web2C TEX and Metafont distributions.

texmf

See TEXMFMAIN below.

texmf-dist

See TEXMFDIST below.

tlpkg

Scripts, programs and data for managing the installation, and some special support for Windows.

In addition to the directories above, the installation scripts and README files (in various languages) are at the top level of the distribution.

For documentation, the comprehensive links in the top-level file doc.html may be helpful. The documentation for the programs (manuals, man pages, Info files) is in texmf/doc. The documentation for TEX packages and formats is in texmf-dist/doc. You can use the texdoc program to find any documentation wherever it is located.

This TEX Live documentation itself is in texmf/doc/texlive, available in several languages:

2.3 Overview of the predefined texmf trees

This section lists the predefined variables specifying the texmf trees used by the system, and their intended purpose, and the default layout of TEX Live. The command tlmgr conf shows the values of these variables, so that you can easily find out how they map to particular directories in your installation.

TEXMFMAIN

The tree which holds vital parts of the system such as configuration files, helper scripts, and program documentation.

TEXMFDIST

The tree which holds the main set of macro packages, fonts, etc.

TEXMFLOCAL

The tree which administrators can use for system-wide installation of additional or updated macros, fonts, etc.

TEXMFHOME

The tree which users can use for their own individual installations of additional or updated macros, fonts, etc. The expansion of this variable dynamically adjusts for each user to their own individual directory.

TEXMFCONFIG

The tree used by the utilities texconfig, updmap, and fmtutil to store modified configuration data. Under TEXMFHOME by default.

TEXMFSYSCONFIG

The tree used by the utilities texconfig-sys, updmap-sys, and fmtutil-sys to store modified configuration data.

TEXMFVAR

The tree used by texconfig, updmap and fmtutil to store (cached) runtime data such as format files and generated map files. Under TEXMFHOME by default.

TEXMFSYSVAR

The tree used by texconfig-sys, updmap-sys and fmtutil-sys, and also by tlmgr, to store (cached) runtime data such as format files and generated map files.

The default layout is:

system-wide root
can span multiple TEX Live releases:
2008

A previous release.

2009

The current release.

bin

 

i386-linux

GNU/Linux binaries

...

universal-darwin

Mac OS X binaries

win32

Windows binaries

texmf       

This is TEXMFMAIN.

texmf-dist  

TEXMFDIST

texmf-var   

TEXMFSYSVAR

texmf-config

TEXMFSYSCONFIG

texmf-local

TEXMFLOCAL, intended to be retained from release to release.

user’s home
($HOME or %USERPROFILE%)
.texlive2008

Privately generated and configuration data for a previous release.

.texlive2009

Privately generated and configuration data for the current release.

texmf-var   

TEXMFVAR

texmf-config

TEXMFCONFIG

texmf

TEXMFHOME Personal macros, etc.

2.4 Extensions to TEX

Knuth’s original TEX itself is frozen, apart from rare bug fixes. It is still present in TEX Live as the program tex, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. TEX Live contains several extended versions of TEX:

e-TEX
adds a 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-dist/doc/etex/base/etex_man.pdf.
pdfTEX
builds on the e-TEX extensions, adding support for writing PDF output as well as DVI, and many non-output-related extensions. This is the program invoked for most formats, e.g., etex, latex, pdflatex. Its web site is http://www.pdftex.org/. See texmf-dist/doc/pdftex/manual/pdftex-a.pdf for the manual, and texmf-dist/doc/pdftex/manual/samplepdf/samplepdf.tex for example usage of some of its features.
LuaTEX
is the designated successor of pdfTEX, and is mostly (but not entirely) backward-compatible. It is also intended to be a functional superset of Aleph (see below), though technical compatibility is not intended. The incorporated Lua interpreter (http://www.lua.org/) enables elegant solutions for many thorny TEX problems. When called as texlua, it functions as a standalone Lua interpreter, and is already used as such within TEX Live. Its web site is http://www.luatex.org/, and the reference manual is texmf-dist/doc/luatex/luatexref-t.pdf.
XeTEX
adds support for Unicode input and OpenType- and system fonts, implemented using standard third-party libraries. See http://tug.org/xetex.
Omega (Omega)
is 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. Omega is no longer included in TEX Live as a separate program; only Aleph is provided:
Aleph
combines the Omega and e-TEX extensions. See texmf-dist/doc/aleph/base for some minimal documentation.

2.5 Other notable programs in TEX Live

Here are a few other commonly-used programs included in TEX Live:

bibtex

bibliography support.

makeindex, xindy

index support.

dvips

convert DVI to PostScript.

xdvi

DVI previewer for the X Window System.

dvilj

DVI drive for the HP LaserJet family.

dviconcat, dviselect

cut and paste pages from DVI files.

dvipdfmx

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.

texexec, texmfstart

ConTEXt and PDF processor.

tex4ht

TEX to HTML (and XML and more) converter.

2.6 Fonts in TEX Live

TEX Live comes with many high-quality scalable fonts. See http://tug.org/fonts and texmf-dist/doc/fonts/free-math-font-survey.

3 Installation

3.1 Starting the installer

To begin, get the TEX Collection DVD or download the TEX Live net installer, and locate the installer script: install-tl for Unix, install-tl.bat for Windows.

Net installer:
Download from CTAN, under systems/texlive/tlnet; the url http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet will automatically redirect to a nearby, up-to-date, mirror. You can retrieve either install-tl.zip which can be used under Unix and Windows, or the considerably smaller install-unx.tar.gz for Unix only. After unpacking, install-tl and install-tl.bat will be in the install-tl subdirectory.
TEX Collection DVD:
go to its texlive subdirectory. Under Windows, the installer normally starts automatically when you insert the DVD. You can get the DVD by becoming a member of a TEX user group (highly recommended, http://tug.org/usergroups.html), or purchasing it separately (http://tug.org/store), or burning your own from the ISO image.

See http://tug.org/texlive/acquire.html for more information and other methods of getting the software.

The following sections explain installer start-up in more detail.

3.1.1 Unix

Below, > denotes the shell prompt; user input is bold. The script install-tl is a Perl script. The simplest way to start it on a Unix-compatible system is as follows:

> cd /path/to/installer
> perl install-tl
(Or you can invoke perl /path/to/installer/install-tl, or ./install-tl if it stayed executable, etc.; we won’t repeat all these variations.) You may have to enlarge your terminal window so that it shows the full text installer screen (Figure 1).

To install in expert GUI mode (figure 2; you’ll need the Perl/TK module), use:

> perl install-tl -gui

For a complete listing of the various options:

> perl install-tl -help

Warning about Unix permissions: Your umask at the time of installation will be respected by the TEX Live installer. Therefore, if you want your installation to be usable by users other than you, make sure your setting is sufficiently permissive, for instance, umask 002. For more information about umask, consult your system documentation.

Special considerations for Cygwin: Unlike other Unix-compatible systems, Cygwin does not by default include all of the prerequisite programs needed by the TEX Live installer. See Section 3.1.4 for details.

3.1.2 MacOSX

As mentioned in section 2.1, a separate distribution is prepared for Mac OS X, named MacTEX (http://tug.org/mactex). We recommend using the native MacTEX installer instead of the TEX Live installer on Mac OS X, because the native installer makes a few Mac-specific adjustments, in particular to allow easily switching between the various TEX distributions for Mac OS X (MacTEX, gwTEX, Fink, MacPorts, …).

MacTEX is firmly based on TEX Live, and the main TEX trees are precisely the same. It does add a few extra folders with Mac-specific documentation and applications.

3.1.3 Windows

If you are using the net installer, or the DVD installer failed to start automatically, double-click install-tl.bat. For more customization options, e.g. selection of specific package collections, run install-tl-advanced.bat instead.

You can also start the installer from the command-prompt. Below, > denotes the prompt; user input is bold. If you are in the installer directory, run just:

> install-tl

Or you can invoke it with an absolute location, such as:

> D:\texlive\install-tl
for the TEX Collection DVD, supposing that D: is the optical drive. Figure 3 displays the wizard installer, which is the default for Windows.

To install in text mode, use:

> install-tl -no-gui

For a complete listing of the various options:

> install-tl -help


  Installing TeX Live 2009 from: ...
  Platform: i386-linux => ’Intel x86 with GNU/Linux’
  Distribution: live (uncompressed)
  ...
   Detected platform: Intel x86 with GNU/Linux
  
   <B> binary systems: 1 out of 14
  
   <S> Installation scheme (scheme-full)
       83 collections out of 84, disk space required: 1882 MB
  
   Customizing installation scheme:
     <C> standard collections
     <L> language collections
  
   <D> directories:
     TEXDIR (the main TeX directory):
       /usr/local/texlive/2009
     TEXMFLOCAL (directory for site-wide local files):
       /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local
     TEXMFSYSVAR (directory for variable and automatically generated data):
       /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-var
     TEXMFSYSCONFIG (directory for local config):
       /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-config
     TEXMFHOME (directory for user-specific files):
       ~/texmf
  
   <O> options:
     [ ] use letter size instead of A4 by default
     [X] create all format files
     [X] install macro/font doc tree
     [X] install macro/font source tree
     [ ] create symlinks to standard directories
  
   <V> set up for running from DVD
  
  Other actions:
   <I> start installation to hard disk
   <H> help
   <Q> quit

Figure 1: Main text installer screen (GNU/Linux)



pict

Figure 2: Expert GUI installer screen (GNU/Linux)



pict

Figure 3: Wizard installer screen (Windows)


3.1.4 Cygwin

The TEX Live installer supports only Cygwin 1.7. Before beginning the installation, use Cygwin’s setup.exe program to install the perl and wget packages if you have not already done so. The following additional packages are recommended:

3.1.5 The text installer

Figure 1 displays the main text mode screen under Unix. The text installer is the default on Unix.

This is only a command-line installer; there is no cursor support at all. For instance, you cannot tab around checkboxes or input fields. You just type something (case-sensitive) at the prompt and press the Enter key, and then the entire terminal screen will be rewritten, with adjusted content.

The text installer interface is this primitive for a reason: it is designed to run on as many platforms as possible, even with a very barebones Perl.

3.1.6 The expert graphical installer

Figure 2 displays the expert graphical installer under GNU/Linux. Other than using buttons and menus, this installer does not differ much from the text one (Figure 1).

This mode can be invoked explicitly with

> install-tl -gui=perltk

3.1.7 The simple wizard installer

Under Windows, the default is to run the simplest installation method we could devise, which we named the “wizard” installer. It installs everything and asks almost no questions. If you want to customize your setup, you should run one of the other installers.

This mode can be invoked explicitly with

> install-tl -gui=wizard

3.2 Running the installer

The installer is intended to be mostly self-explanatory, but following are a few notes about the various options and submenus.

3.2.1 Binary systems menu (Unix only)


  Available sets of binaries:
  ===============================================================================
  
     a [ ] alpha-linux      DEC Alpha with GNU/Linux
     b [ ] i386-cygwin      Intel x86 with Cygwin
     c [X] i386-linux       Intel x86 with GNU/Linux
     d [ ] i386-netbsd      Intel x86 with NetBSD
     e [ ] i386-solaris     Intel x86 with Sun Solaris
     f [ ] mips-irix        SGI IRIX
     g [ ] powerpc-aix      PowerPC with AIX
     h [ ] powerpc-linux    PowerPC with GNU/Linux
     i [ ] sparc-linux      Sparc with GNU/Linux
     j [ ] sparc-solaris    Sparc with Solaris
     k [ ] universal-darwin universal binaries for MacOSX/Darwin
     l [ ] win32            Windows
     m [ ] x86_64-linux     x86_64 with GNU/Linux

Figure 4: Binaries menu


Figure 4 displays the text mode binaries menu. By default, only the binaries for your current platform will be installed. From this menu, you can select installation of binaries for other architectures as well. This can be useful if you are sharing a TEX tree across a network of heterogenous machines, or for a dual-boot system.

3.2.2 Selecting what is going to be installed


  Select a scheme:
  ===============================================================================
   a [ ] basic scheme (plain and LaTeX)
   b [ ] ConTeXt scheme
   c [X] full scheme (everything)
   d [ ] GUST TeX Live scheme
   e [ ] GUTenberg TeX Live scheme
   f [ ] medium scheme (plain, latex, recommended packages, some languages)
   g [ ] minimal scheme (plain only)
   h [ ] Omega scheme
   i [ ] teTeX scheme (more than medium, but nowhere near full)
   j [ ] XML scheme
   k [ ] custom selection of collections

Figure 5: Scheme menu


Figure 5 displays the TEX Live scheme menu; from here, you choose a “scheme”, which is an overall set of package collections. The default full scheme installs everything available, but you can also choose the basic scheme for a small system, minimal for testing purposes, and medium or teTeX to get something in between. There are also various specialized and country-specific schemes.


pict

Figure 6: Collections menu


You can refine your scheme selection with the ‘standard collections’ and ‘language collections’ menus (figure 6, shown in GUI mode for a change).

Collections are one level more detailed than schemes — in essence, a scheme consists of several collections, a collection consists of one or more packages, and a package (the lowest level grouping in TEX Live) contains the actual TEX macro files, font files, and so on.

If you want more control than the collection menus provide, you can use the tlmgr program after installation (see section 6); using that, you can control the installation at the package level.

3.2.3 Directories

The default layout is described in section 2.3, p. 8. The default location of TEXDIR is different between Windows (%SystemDrive%\texlive\2009) and Unix (/usr/local/texlive/2009).

The main reason to change this default is if you lack write permission for the default location. You don’t have to be root or administrator to install TEX Live, but you do need write access to the target directory.

A reasonable alternative choice is a directory under your home directory, especially if you will be the sole user. Use ‘~’ to indicate this, as in ‘~/texlive/2009’.

We recommend including the year in the name, to enable keeping different releases of TEX Live side by side. (You may wish to make a version-independent name such as /usr/local/texlive-cur via a symbolic link, which you can then update after testing the new release.)

Changing TEXDIR in the installer will also change TEXMFLOCAL, TEXMFSYSVAR and TEXMFSYSCONFIG.

TEXMFHOME is the recommended location for personal macro files or packages. The default value is ~/texmf. In contrast to TEXDIR, here a ~ is preserved in the newly-written configuration files, since it usefully refers to the home directory of any individual running TEX. It expands to $HOME on Unix and %USERPROFILE% on Windows.

3.2.4 Options


   <P> use letter size instead of A4 by default: [ ]
   <F> create format files:                      [X]
   <D> install font/macro doc tree:              [X]
   <S> install font/macro source tree:           [X]
   <L> create symlinks in standard directories:  [ ]
              binaries to:
              manpages to:
                  info to:

Figure 7: Options menu (Unix)


Figure 7 shows the text mode options menu. More info:

use letter size instead of A4 by default:
The default paper size selection. Of course, individual documents can and should specify a specific paper size, if desired.
create format files:
Although unnecessary format files take time to generate and disk space to store, it is still recommended to leave this option checked: if you don’t, then format files will be generated in people’s private TEXMFVAR tree as they are needed. In that location, they will not be updated automatically if (say) binaries or hyphenation patterns are updated in the installation, and thus could end up with incompatible format files.
install font/macro  tree:
These options allow you to omit downloading/installing the documentation and source files present in most packages. Not recommended.
create symlinks in standard directories
(Unix only): This option bypasses the need to change environment variables. Without this option, TEX Live directories usually have to be added to PATH, MANPATH and INFOPATH. You will need write permissions to the target directories. It is strongly advised not to overwrite a TEX system that came with your system with this option. It is intended primarily for accessing the TEX system through directories that are already known to users, such as /usr/local/bin, which don’t already contain any TEX files.

When all the settings are to your liking, you can type ‘I’ to start the installation process. When it is done, skip to section 3.4 to read what else needs to be done, if anything.

3.2.5 Set up for running from DVD (text mode only)

Type ‘V’ to select this option. This changes the main menu into something as in figure 8.


  ======================> TeX Live installation procedure <=====================
  ...
   <D> directories:
     TEXDIRW (Writable root):
       !! default location: /usr/local/texlive/2009
       !! is not writable, please select a different one!
     TEXMFLOCAL (directory for site-wide local files):
       /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local
     TEXMFSYSVAR (directory for variable and automatically generated data):
       /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-var
     TEXMFSYSCONFIG (directory for local config):
       /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-config
     TEXMFHOME (directory for user-specific files):
       ~/texmf
  
   <O> options:
     [ ] use letter size instead of A4 by default
     [X] create all format files
  
   <V> set up for installing to hard disk
  
  Other actions:
   <I> start installation for running from DVD
   <H> help
   <Q> quit

Figure 8: The main menu with ‘from DVD’ set


Note the changes: all options about what to install have disappeared, and the directories section now talks about TEXDIRW or writable root. The symlinks option has also disappeared.

The installer will still create various directories and configuration files, but won’t copy texmf or texmf-dist to hard disk.

Post-install configuration for Unix will be slightly more complicated, because now the directory layout deviates from the default; see section 3.4.

This option is not in the GUI installer, but it is available both for Unix and for Windows. Windows users have to start the installer from a command prompt, see section 3.3.

Section 5 describes a more strictly portable way to run TEX Live, which doesn’t make or require any changes in the system’s configuration, but doesn’t allow any configuration either.

3.3 Command-line install-tl options

Type

> install-tl -help
for a listing of command-line options. Either - or -- can be used to introduce option names. These are the most common ones:

-gui

If possible, use the GUI installer. This requires the Perl/Tk module (http://tug.org/texlive/distro.html#perltk); if Perl/Tk is not available, installation continues in text mode.

-no-gui

Force using the text mode installer, even under Windows; you’ll need this if you want a ‘from DVD’ installation, since that is not available in GUI mode.

-lang LL

Specify the installer interface language as its standard two-letter code LL. Currently supported languages: English (en, default), German (de), French (fr), Dutch (nl), Polish (pl), Slovenian (sl) and Vietnamese (vi). The installer tries to determine the right language itself but if it fails, or if the right language is not available, then it uses English as a fallback.

-profile file

The installer always writes a file texlive.profile to the tlpkg subdirectory of your installation. This option tells the installer to re-use such a profile file, so you can install in batch mode on subsequent systems, reproducing the choices you made in a prior installation.

-repository url-or-directory

Specify package repository from which to install; see following.

3.3.1 The -repository option

The default package repository is a CTAN mirror chosen automatically via http://mirror.ctan.org.

If you want to override that, the location value can be a url starting with ftp:, http:, or file:/, or a plain directory path. (When giving an http: or ftp: location, trailing ‘/’ characters and/or a trailing ‘/tlpkg’ component are ignored.)

For example, you could choose a particular CTAN mirror with something like: http://ctan.example.org/tex-archive/systems/texlive/tlnet/, substituting a real hostname and its particular top-level CTAN path for ctan.example.org. The list of CTAN mirrors is maintained at http://ctan.org/mirrors.

If the given argument is local (either a path or a file:/ url), compressed files in an archive subdirectory of the repository path are used (even if uncompressed files are available as well).

3.4 Post-install actions

Some post-install may be required.

3.4.1 Windows

But on Windows, the installer takes care of everything.

3.4.2 If symlinks were created

If you elected to create symlinks in standard directories (mentioned in section 3.2.4), then there is no need to edit environment variables.

3.4.3 Environment variables for Unix

The directory of the binaries for your platform must be added to the search path. Each supported platform has its own subdirectory under TEXDIR/bin. See figure 4 for the list of subdirectories and corresponding platforms.

You can also add the documentation man and Info directories to their respective search paths, if you want the system tools to find them. The man pages might be found automatically after the addition to PATH.

For Bourne-compatible shells such as bash, and using Intel x86 GNU/Linux and a default directory setup as an example, the file to edit might be $HOME/.profile (or another file sourced by .profile, and the lines to add would look like this:

  PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2009/bin/i386-linux:$PATH; export PATH
  MANPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf/doc/man:$MANPATH; export MANPATH
  INFOPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf/doc/info:$INFOPATH; export INFOPATH

For csh or tcsh, the file to edit is typically $HOME/.cshrc, and the lines to add might look like:

  setenv PATH /usr/local/texlive/2009/bin/i386-linux:$PATH
  setenv MANPATH /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf/doc/man:$MANPATH
  setenv INFOPATH /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf/doc/info:$INFOPATH

If you already have settings somewhere in your “dot” files, naturally the TEX Live directories should simply be merged in as appropriate.

3.4.4 Environment variables: global configuration

If you want to make these changes globally, or for a user newly added to the system, then you are on your own; there is just too much variation between systems in how and where these things are configured.

Our two hints are: 1) you may want to check for a file /etc/manpath.config and, if present, add lines such as

  MANPATH_MAP /usr/local/texlive/2009/bin/i386-linux \
              /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf/doc/man

And 2) check for a file /etc/environment which may define the search path and other default environment variables.

We also create a symbolic link named man in each (Unix) binary directory. Some man programs, such as the standard Mac OS X man, will automatically find that, obviating the need for any man page setup.

3.4.5 Font configuration for XeTEX

If you have installed the xetex package on a Unix-compatible system, you need to configure your system if you want XeTEX to be able to find the fonts shipped with TEX Live. To facilitate this, when the xetex package is installed (either at initial installation or later), the necessary configuration file is created in TEXMFSYSVAR/fonts/conf/texlive-fontconfig.conf.

To set up the TEX Live fonts for system-wide use (assuming you have suitable privileges), proceed as follows:

  1. Copy the texlive-fontconfig.conf file to /etc/fonts/conf.d/09-texlive.conf.
  2. Run fc-cache -fsv.

If you do not have sufficient privileges to carry out the steps above, you can instead do the following to make the TEX Live fonts available to you as an individual XeTEX user:

  1. Copy the texlive-fontconfig.conf file to  /.fonts.conf, where   is your home directory.
  2. Run fc-cache -fv.

3.4.6 When running from DVD

Normally, a TEX Live program consults a file texmf.cnf for the location of the various trees. It looks for this file in a series of locations relative to its own location. However, this scheme breaks down when a program is run from DVD: the DVD is read-only. Some of the paths to be recorded in texmf.cnf are only known at installation time, so this file cannot be on the DVD and must be placed somewhere else. This makes it necessary to define an environment TEXMFCNF variable which tells TEX Live programs in what directory to find this texmf.cnf. It is also still necessary to modify the PATH environment variable, as described before.

At the end of the installation, the installer should have printed a message giving the value to which TEXMFCNF should be set. In case you missed it: this value is $TEXMFSYSVAR/web2c. For the default, /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-var/web2c, you need the lines

  TEXMFCNF=/usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-var/web2c; export TEXMFCNF

or, for [t]csh:

  setenv TEXMFCNF /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-var/web2c

This option is most useful when you want to run TEX Live on your own system, but don’t have enough disk space to install it. If you want a truly ‘portable’ TEX Live that is self-contained, e.g., for a USB stick, see section 5.

3.4.7 ConTEXt Mark IV

The ‘old’ ConTEXt should run out of the box. The new ‘Mark IV’ ConTEXt will require manual setup; see http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Running_Mark_IV.

3.4.8 Integrating local and personal macros

This is already mentioned implicitly in section 2.3: TEXMFLOCAL (by default, /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local or %SystemDrive%\texlive\texmf-local) is intended for system-wide local fonts and macros; and TEXMFHOME (by default, $HOME/texmf or %USERPROFILE%\texmf), is for personal fonts and macros. These directories are intended to stick around from release to release, and have their content seen automatically by a new TEX Live release. Therefore, it is best to refrain from changing the definition of TEXMFLOCAL to be too far away from the main TEX Live directory, or you will need to manually change future releases.

For both trees, files should be placed in their proper subdirectories; see http://tug.org/tds or consult texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf. For instance, a LATEX class file or package should be placed in TEXMFLOCAL/tex/latex or TEXMFHOME/tex/latex, or a subdirectory thereof.

TEXMFLOCAL requires an up-to-date filename database, or files will not be found. You can update it with the command mktexlsr or use the ‘Reinit file database’ button on the configuration tab of tlmgr in GUI mode.

3.4.9 Integrating third-party fonts

This is unfortunately a messy topic. Forget about it unless you want to delve into many details of the TEX installation. Don’t forget to check first what you get for free: see section 2.6.

A possible alternative is to use XeTEX (see section 2.4), which lets you use operating system fonts without any installation in TEX.

If you do need to do this, see http://tug.org/fonts/fontinstall.html for our best effort at describing the procedure.

3.5 Testing the installation

After installing TEX Live as best you can, you naturally want to test it out, so you can start creating beautiful documents and/or fonts.

This section gives some basic procedures for testing that the new system is functional. We give Unix commands here; under Mac OS X and Windows, you’re more likely to run the tests through a graphical interface, but the principles are the same.

  1. Make sure that you can run the tex program in the first place:

    > tex --version
    TeX 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2009)
    kpathsea version 5.0.0
    Copyright 2009 D.E. Knuth.
    ...
    If this comes back with ‘command not found’ instead of version and copyright information, or with an older version, most likely you don’t have the correct bin subdirectory in your PATH. See the environment-setting information on p. 39.
  2. Process a basic LATEX file:

    > latex sample2e.tex
    This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009)
    ...
    Output written on sample2e.dvi (3 pages, 7484 bytes).
    Transcript written on sample2e.log.
    If this fails to find sample2e.tex or other files, most likely you have interference from old environment variables or configuration files; we recommend unsetting all TEX-related environment variables for a start. (For a deep analysis, you can ask TEX to report on exactly what it is searching for, and finding; see “Debugging actions” on page 65.)
  3. Preview the result online:

    > xdvi sample2e.dvi    # Unix
    > dviout sample2e.dvi  # Windows
    You should see a new window with a nice document explaining some of the basics of LATEX. (Well worth reading, by the way, if you’re new to TEX.) You do have to be running under X for xdvi to work; if you’re not, or your DISPLAY environment variable is set incorrectly, you’ll get an error ‘Can’t open display’.
  4. Create a PostScript file for printing or display:

    > dvips sample2e.dvi -o sample2e.ps
  5. Create a PDF file instead of DVI; this processes the .tex file and writes PDF directly:

    > pdflatex sample2e.tex
  6. Preview the PDF file:

    > gv sample2e.pdf
    or:
    > xpdf sample2e.pdf
    Neither gv nor xpdf are included in TEX Live, so you must install them separately. See http://www.gnu.org/software/gv and http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf, respectively. There are plenty of other PDF viewers, too. For Windows, we recommend trying Sumatra PDF (http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf).
  7. Standard test files you may find useful in addition to sample2e.tex:

    small2e.tex

    A simpler document than sample2e, to reduce the input size if you’re having troubles.

    testpage.tex

    Test if your printer introduces any offsets.

    nfssfont.tex

    For printing font tables and tests.

    testfont.tex

    Also for font tables, but using plain TEX.

    story.tex

    The most canonical (plain) TEX test file of all. You must type ‘\bye’ to the * prompt after ‘tex story.tex’.

  8. If you have installed the xetex package, you can test its access to system fonts as follows:

    > xetex opentype-info.tex
    This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926
    ...
    Output written on opentype-info.pdf (1 page).
    Transcript written on opentype-info.log.
    If you get an error message saying “Invalid fontname ‘Latin Modern Roman/ICU’…”, then you need to configure your system so that XeTEX can find the fonts shipped with TEX Live. See Section 3.4.5.

3.6 Links for additional downloadable software

If you are new to TEX, or otherwise need help with actually writing TEX or LATEX documents, please visit http://tug.org/begin.html for some introductory resources.

Links for some other tools you may consider installing:

Ghostscript
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
Perl
http://www.perl.org/ with supplementary packages from CPAN, http://www.cpan.org/
ImageMagick
http://www.imagemagick.com, for graphics processing and conversion
NetPBM
http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/, also for graphics.
TEX-oriented editors
There is a wide choice, and it is a matter of the user’s taste. Here is a selection (a few here are for Windows only).

For a much longer list of packages and programs, see http://tug.org/interest.html.

4 Network installations

TEX Live has been designed to be shared between different users, and even different systems on a network. With a standard directory layout, no hard paths are configured: the locations for files needed by TEX Live programs are found relative to the programs. You can see this in the principal configuration file $TEXMFMAIN/web2c/texmf.cnf, which contains lines such as

  TEXMFMAIN = $SELFAUTOPARENT/texmf
  ...
  TEXMFLOCAL = $SELFAUTOPARENT/../texmf-local

This means that adding the directory for TEX Live executables for their platform to their search path is sufficient to get a working setup.

By the same token, you can also install TEX Live locally and then move the entire hierarchy afterwards to a network location.

For Windows, a sample network installation script named w32client can be downloaded through http://tug.org/texlive/w32client.html. It creates settings and menu shortcuts for using an existing TEX Live installation on a LAN. It also registers an uninstaller w32unclient, available in the same zip file. See the web page for more information.

5 Maximally portable TEX Live on DVD and USB

The ‘running from DVD’ option described in section 3.2.5 is fine for your own system, but if you are a guest on somebody else’s system then you would probably like something with minimal side effects.

In the root of the TEX Live DVD, or the texlive subdirectory of the TEX Collection DVD, are a tl-portable script (Unix) and a tl-portable.bat batch file (Windows) which start up a secondary shell/command prompt with environment settings for directly accessing the TEX Live on the DVD.

When it runs for the first time, some files will be generated in a directory  /.tlportable2009, which will take a little time. On subsequent runs, though, it will start almost instantaneously.

The rest of the system will be unaware of TEX Live. If you want your editor to be aware of this TEX Live, then you can start it from a second, parallel, such tl-portable session.

You can also use tl-portable to run TEX Live on a USB stick. In this case, copy all the top-level files and the contents of the bin, texmf, texmf-dist, and tlpkg directories (at least) to the stick. This may take quite a while! If you are copying to a FAT32-formatted USB stick, make sure to dereference symbolic links (cp -L). A texmf-local directory on the stick will also be found and used.

Then run tl-portable from the root of the stick, as above. In this case, the script will notice that the stick is writable and use it for generated files. You could burn the resulting contents of the stick back to DVD if that is more convenient to (for example) give to others.

6 tlmgr: Managing your installation


pict

Figure 9: tlmgr in GUI mode. The list of packages/collections/schemes only shows up after clicking the ‘Load’ button.



pict

Figure 10: tlmgr in GUI mode: Configuration tab


TEX Live includes a program named tlmgr for managing TEX Live after the initial installation. The programs updmap, fmtutil and texconfig are still included and will be retained in the future, but tlmgr is now the preferred interface. Its capabilities include:

Warning: tlmgr has not been designed for or tested with installations which run from DVD.

6.1 tlmgr GUI mode

tlmgr can be started in GUI mode with

> tlmgr -gui
or in Windows via the Start menu: Start, Programs, TeX Live 2009, TeX Live Manager. After clicking ‘Load’ it displays a list of available and installed packages — the latter prepended with ‘(i)’. This assumes of course that the installation source is valid and reachable.

Figure 10 shows the configuration tab.

6.2 Sample tlmgr command-line invocations

After the initial installation, you can update your system to the latest versions available with:

> tlmgr update -all
If this makes you nervous, first try

> tlmgr update -all -dry-run
or (less verbose):

> tlmgr update -list

This more complex example adds a collection, for the engine XeTEX, from a local directory:

> tlmgr -repository /local/mirror/tlnet install collection-xetex
It generates the following output (abridged):
  install: collection-xetex
  install: arabxetex
  ...
  install: xetex
  install: xetexconfig
  install: xetex.i386-linux
  running post install action for xetex
  install: xetex-def
  ...
  running mktexlsr
  mktexlsr: Updating /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf/ls-R...
  ...
  running fmtutil-sys --missing
  ...
  Transcript written on xelatex.log.
  fmtutil: /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-var/web2c/xetex/xelatex.fmt installed.

As you can see, tlmgr installs dependencies, and takes care of any necessary post-install actions, including updating the filename database and (re)generating formats. In the above, we generated new formats for XeTEX.

To describe a package (or collection or scheme):

> tlmgr show collection-latexextra
which produces
  package:    collection-latexextra
  category:   Collection
  shortdesc:  LaTeX supplementary packages
  longdesc:   A large collection of add-on packages for LaTeX.
  installed:  Yes
  revision:   14675

Last and most important, for full documentation see http://tug.org/texlive/tlmgr.html, or:

> tlmgr -help

7 Notes on Windows

TEX Live has a single installer which runs on both Windows and Unix. This was only possible by dropping support for older Windows versions, so TEX Live can now be installed only on Windows 2000 and later.

7.1 Windows-specific features

Under Windows, the installer does some extra things:

Menus and shortcuts.
A new ‘TEX Live’ submenu of the Start menu is installed, which contains entries for some GUI programs (tlmgr, texdoctk, the PS_View (psv) PostScript previewer) and some documentation. PS_View also gets a shortcut on the desktop as a drag-and-drop target for PostScript files.
Automatic setting of environment variables.
No manual configuration steps are required.
Uninstaller.
The installer creates an entry under ‘Add/Remove Programs’ for TEX Live. The uninstall tab of tlmgr refers to this.

7.2 Additional software included on Windows

To be complete, a TEX Live installation needs support packages that are not commonly found on a Windows machine. TEX Live provides the missing pieces:

Perl and Ghostscript.
Because of the importance of Perl and Ghostscript, TEX Live includes ‘hidden’ copies of these programs. TEX Live programs that need them know where to find them, but they don’t betray their presence through environment variables or registry settings. They aren’t full-scale installations, and shouldn’t interfere with any system installations of Perl or Ghostscript.
PS_View.
Also installed is PS_View, a PostScript and PDF viewer; see figure 11.


pict
Figure 11: PS_View: very high magnifications available!


dviout.
Also installed is dviout, a DVI viewer. At first, when you preview files with dviout, it will create fonts, because screen fonts were not installed. After a while, you will have created most of the fonts you use, and you will rarely see the font-creation window. More information can be found in the (highly recommended) on-line help.
TeXworks.
TEXworks is a TEX-oriented editor with an integrated PDF viewer. It comes already preconfigured for TEX Live.
Command-line tools.
A number of Windows ports of common Unix command-line programs are installed along with the usual TEX Live binaries. These include gzip, unzip and the command-line utilities from the xpdf suite. The xpdf viewer itself is not available for Windows. Instead, you can download the Sumatra PDF viewer, which is based on xpdf, from http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf.
fc-list, fc-cache et al.
The tools from the fontconfig library allow XeTEX to handle system fonts on Windows. You can use fc-list to determine the font names to pass to XeTEX’s extended \font command. If necessary, run fc-cache first to update font information.

7.3 User Profile is Home

The Windows counterpart of a Unix home directory is the %USERPROFILE% directory. Under Windows XP and Windows 2000, this is usually C:\Documents and Settings\<username>, and under Windows Vista C:\Users\<username>. In the texmf.cnf file, and Kpathsea in general, ~ will expand appropriately on both Windows and Unix.

7.4 The Windows registry

Windows stores nearly all configuration data in its registry. The registry contains a set of hierarchically organized keys, with several root keys. The most important ones for installation programs are HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, HKCU and HKLM in short. The HKCU part of the registry is in the user’s home directory (see section 7.3). HKLM is normally in a subdirectory of the Windows directory.

In some cases, system information could be obtained from environment variables but for other information, for example the location of shortcuts, it is necessary to consult the registry. Setting environment variables permanently also requires registry access.

7.5 Windows permissions

In later versions of Windows, a distinction is made between regular users and administrators, where only the latter have free access to the entire operating system. In practice, though, you could better describe these classes of users as unprivileged users and normal users: being an administrator is the rule, not the exception. Nevertheless, we have made an effort to make TEX Live installable without administrative privileges.

If the user is an administrator, there is an option to install for all users. If this option is chosen, shortcuts are created for all users, and the system environment is modified. Otherwise, shortcuts and menu entries are created for the current user, and the user environment is modified.

Regardless of administrator status, the default root of TEX Live proposed by the installer is always under %SystemDrive%. The installer always tests whether the root is writable for the current user.

A problem may arise if the user is not an administrator and TEX already exists in the search path. Since the effective path consists of the system path followed by the user path, the new TEX Live would never get precedence. As a safeguard, the installer creates a shortcut to the command-prompt in which the new TEX Live binary directory is prepended to the local search path. The new TEX Live will be always usable from within such a command-prompt. The shortcut for TEXworks, if installed, also prepends TEX Live to the search path, so it should also be immune to this path problem.

For Vista there is another twist: even if you are logged in as administrator, you need to explicitly ask for administrator privileges. In fact, there is not much point in logging in as administrator. Instead, right-clicking on the program or shortcut that you want to run usually gives you a choice ‘Run as administrator’.

8 A user’s guide to Web2C

Web2C is an integrated collection of TEX-related programs: TEX itself, Metafont, MetaPost, BibTeX, etc. It is the heart of TEX Live. The home page for Web2C, with the current manual and more, is http://tug.org/web2c.

A bit of history: The original implementation was by Tomas Rokicki who, in 1987, developed a first TEX-to-C system based on change files under Unix, which were primarily the original work of Howard Trickey and Pavel Curtis. Tim Morgan became the maintainer of the system, and during this period the name changed to Web-to-C. In 1990, Karl Berry took over the work, assisted by dozens of additional contributors, and in 1997 he handed the baton to Olaf Weber, who returned it to Karl in 2006.

The Web2C system runs on Unix, 32-bit Windows systems, Mac OS X, and other operating systems. It uses Knuth’s original sources for TEX and other basic programs written in the WEB literate programming system and translates them into C source code. The core TEX programs handled in this way are:

bibtex

Maintaining bibliographies.

dvicopy

Expands virtual font references in DVI files.

dvitomp

DVI to MPX (MetaPost pictures).

dvitype

DVI to human-readable text.

gftodvi

Generic font proofsheets.

gftopk

Generic to packed fonts.

gftype

GF to human-readable text.

mf

Creating typeface families.

mft

Prettyprinting Metafont source.

mpost

Creating technical diagrams.

patgen

Creating hyphenation patterns.

pktogf

Packed to generic fonts.

pktype

PK to human-readable text.

pltotf

Plain text property list to TFM.

pooltype

Display WEB pool files.

tangle

WEB to Pascal.

tex

Typesetting.

tftopl

TFM to plain text property list.

vftovp

Virtual font to virtual property list.

vptovf

Virtual property list to virtual font.

weave

WEB to TEX.

The precise functions and syntax of these programs are described in the documentation of the individual packages and of Web2C itself. However, knowing a few principles governing the whole family of programs will help you take advantage of your Web2C installation.

All programs honor these standard GNU options:

--help

print basic usage summary.

--verbose

print detailed progress report.

--version

print version information, then exit.

For locating files the Web2C programs use the path searching library Kpathsea (http://tug.org/kpathsea). This library uses a combination of environment variables and a configuration files to optimize searching the (huge) collection of TEX files. Web2C can look at many directory trees simultaneously, which is useful in maintaining TEX’s standard distribution and local and personal extensions in distinct trees. To speed up file searches, the root of each tree has a file ls-R, containing an entry showing the name and relative pathname for all files under that root.

8.1 Kpathsea path searching

Let us first describe the generic path searching mechanism of the Kpathsea library.

We call a search path a colon- or semicolon-separated list of path elements, which are basically directory names. A search path can come from (a combination of) many sources. To look up a file ‘my-file’ along a path ‘.:/dir’, Kpathsea checks each element of the path in turn: first ./my-file, then /dir/my-file, returning the first match (or possibly all matches).

In order to adapt optimally to all operating systems’ conventions, on non-Unix systems Kpathsea can use filename separators different from colon (‘:’) and slash (‘/’).

To check a particular path element p, Kpathsea first checks if a prebuilt database (see “Filename database” on page 62) applies to p, i.e., if the database is in a directory that is a prefix of p. If so, the path specification is matched against the contents of the database.

If the database does not exist, or does not apply to this path element, or contains no matches, the filesystem is searched (if this was not forbidden by a specification starting with ‘!!’ and if the file being searched for must exist). Kpathsea constructs the list of directories that correspond to this path element, and then checks in each for the file being sought.

The “file must exist” condition comes into play with ‘.vf’ files and input files read by TEX’s \openin command. Such files may not exist (e.g., cmr10.vf), and so it would be wrong to search the disk for them. Therefore, if you fail to update ls-R when you install a new ‘.vf’ file, it will never be found. Each path element is checked in turn: first the database, then the disk. If a match is found, the search stops and the result is returned.

Although the simplest and most common path element is a directory name, Kpathsea supports additional features in search paths: layered default values, environment variable names, config file values, users’ home directories, and recursive subdirectory searching. Thus, we say that Kpathsea expands a path element, meaning it transforms all the specifications into basic directory name or names. This is described in the following sections in the same order as it takes place.

Note that if the filename being searched for is absolute or explicitly relative, i.e., starts with ‘/’ or ‘./’ or ‘../’, Kpathsea simply checks if that file exists.

8.1.1 Path sources

A search path can come from many sources. In the order in which Kpathsea uses them:

  1. A user-set environment variable, for instance, TEXINPUTS. Environment variables with a period and a program name appended override; e.g., if ‘latex’ is the name of the program being run, then TEXINPUTS.latex will override TEXINPUTS.
  2. A program-specific configuration file, for example, a line ‘S /a:/b’ in dvips’s config.ps.
  3. A Kpathsea configuration file texmf.cnf, containing a line like ‘TEXINPUTS=/c:/d’ (see below).
  4. The compile-time default.

You can see each of these values for a given search path by using the debugging options (see “Debugging actions” on page 65).

8.1.2 Config files

Kpathsea reads runtime configuration files named texmf.cnf for search path and other definitions. The search path used to look for these files is named TEXMFCNF (by default such a file lives in the texmf/web2c subdirectory). All texmf.cnf files in the search path will be read and definitions in earlier files override those in later files. Thus, with a search path of .:$TEXMF, values from ./texmf.cnf override those from $TEXMF/texmf.cnf.

A configuration file fragment illustrating most of these points is shown below:

  TEXMF              = {$TEXMFLOCAL,!!$TEXMFMAIN}
  TEXINPUTS.latex    = .;$TEXMF/tex/{latex,generic;}//
  TEXINPUTS.fontinst = .;$TEXMF/tex//;$TEXMF/fonts/afm//
  % e-TeX related files
  TEXINPUTS.elatex   = .;$TEXMF/{etex,tex}/{latex,generic;}//
  TEXINPUTS.etex     = .;$TEXMF/{etex,tex}/{eplain,plain,generic;}//

8.1.3 Path expansion

Kpathsea recognizes certain special characters and constructions in search paths, similar to those available in Unix shells. As a general example, the complex path, ~$USER/{foo,bar}//baz, expands to all subdirectories under directories foo and bar in $USER’s home directory that contain a directory or file baz. These expansions are explained in the sections below.

8.1.4 Default expansion

If the highest-priority search path (see “Path sources” on page 57) contains an extra colon (i.e., leading, trailing, or doubled), Kpathsea inserts at that point the next-highest-priority search path that is defined. If that inserted path has an extra colon, the same happens with the next highest. For example, given an environment variable setting

> setenv TEXINPUTS /home/karl:
and a TEXINPUTS value from texmf.cnf of

  .:$TEXMF//tex
then the final value used for searching will be:

  /home/karl:.:$TEXMF//tex

Since it would be useless to insert the default value in more than one place, Kpathsea changes only one extra ‘:’ and leaves any others in place. It checks first for a leading ‘:’, then a trailing ‘:’, then a doubled ‘:’.

8.1.5 Brace expansion

A useful feature is brace expansion, which means that, for instance, v{a,b}w expands to vaw:vbw. Nesting is allowed. This is used to implement multiple TEX hierarchies, by assigning a brace list to $TEXMF. For example, in texmf.cnf, the following definition (approximately; there are actually even more trees) is made:

    TEXMF = {$TEXMFHOME,$TEXMFLOCAL,!!$TEXMFVAR,!!$TEXMFMAIN}

Using this you can then write something like

    TEXINPUTS = .;$TEXMF/tex//

which means that, after looking in the current directory, the $TEXMFHOME/tex, $TEXMFLOCAL/tex, $TEXMFVAR/tex and $TEXMFMAIN/tex trees only) will be searched (the last two use using ls-R data base files). It is a convenient way for running two parallel TEX structures, one “frozen” (on a CD, for instance) and the other being continuously updated with new versions as they become available. By using the $TEXMF variable in all definitions, one is sure to always search the up-to-date tree first.

8.1.6 Subdirectory expansion

Two or more consecutive slashes in a path element following a directory d is replaced by all subdirectories of d: first those subdirectories directly under d, then the subsubdirectories under those, and so on. At each level, the order in which the directories are searched is unspecified.

If you specify any filename components after the ‘//’, only subdirectories with matching components are included. For example, ‘/a//b’ expands into directories /a/1/b, /a/2/b, /a/1/1/b, and so on, but not /a/b/c or /a/1.

Multiple ‘//’ constructs in a path are possible, but ‘//’ at the beginning of a path is ignored.

8.1.7 List of special characters and their meaning: a summary

The following list summarizes the special characters in Kpathsea configuration files.

:

Separator in path specification; at the beginning or the end of a path it substitutes the default path expansion.

;

Separator on non-Unix systems (acts like :).

$

Variable expansion.

~

Represents the user’s home directory.

{...}

Brace expansion.

//

Subdirectory expansion (can occur anywhere in a path, except at its beginning).

%

Start of comment.

\

Continuation character (allows multi-line entries).

!!

Search only database to locate file, do not search the disk.

8.2 Filename databases

Kpathsea goes to some lengths to minimize disk accesses for searches. Nevertheless, at installations with enough directories, searching each possible directory for a given file can take an excessively long time (this is especially true if many hundreds of font directories have to be traversed.) Therefore, Kpathsea can use an externally-built plain text “database” file named ls-R that maps files to directories, thus avoiding the need to exhaustively search the disk.

A second database file aliases allows you to give additional names to the files listed in ls-R. This can be helpful to confirm to DOS 8.3 filename conventions in source files.

8.2.1 The filename database

As explained above, the name of the main filename database must be ls-R. You can put one at the root of each TEX hierarchy in your installation that you wish to be searched ($TEXMF by default). Kpathsea looks for ls-R files along the TEXMFDBS path.

The recommended way to create and maintain ‘ls-R’ is to run the mktexlsr script included with the distribution. It is invoked by the various ‘mktex’… scripts. In principle, this script just runs the command

cd /your/texmf/root && \ls -1LAR ./ >ls-R
presuming your system’s ls produces the right output format (GNU ls is all right). To ensure that the database is always up-to-date, it is easiest to rebuild it regularly via cron, so that it is automatically updated when the installed files change, such as after installing or updating a LATEX package.

If a file is not found in the database, by default Kpathsea goes ahead and searches the disk. If a particular path element begins with ‘!!’, however, only the database will be searched for that element, never the disk.

8.2.2 kpsewhich: Standalone path searching

The kpsewhich program exercises path searching independent of any particular application. This can be useful as a sort of find program to locate files in TEX hierarchies (this is used heavily in the distributed ‘mktex’… scripts).

> kpsewhich option filename
The options specified in option start with either ‘-’ or ‘--’, and any unambiguous abbreviation is accepted.

Kpathsea looks up each non-option argument on the command line as a filename, and returns the first file found. There is no option to return all the files with a particular name (you can run the Unix ‘find’ utility for that).

The most common options are described next.

--dpi=num

Set the resolution to num; this only affects ‘gf’ and ‘pk’ lookups. ‘-D’ is a synonym, for compatibility with dvips. Default is 600.

--format=name


Set the format for lookup to name. By default, the format is guessed from the filename. For formats which do not have an associated unambiguous suffix, such as MetaPost support files and dvips configuration files, you have to specify the name as known to Kpathsea, such as tex or enc files. Run kpsewhich --help for a list.

--mode=string


Set the mode name to string; this only affects ‘gf’ and ‘pk’ lookups. No default: any mode will be found.

--must-exist


Do everything possible to find the files, notably including searching the disk. By default, only the ls-R database is checked, in the interest of efficiency.

--path=string


Search along the path string (colon-separated as usual), instead of guessing the search path from the filename. ‘//’ and all the usual expansions are supported. The options ‘--path’ and ‘--format’ are mutually exclusive.

--progname=name


Set the program name to name. This can affect the search paths via the .progname feature. The default is kpsewhich.

--show-path=name


shows the path used for file lookups of file type name. Either a filename extension (.pk, .vf, etc.) or a name can be used, just as with ‘--format’ option.

--debug=num


sets the debugging options to num.

8.2.3 Examples of use

Let us now have a look at Kpathsea in action. Here’s a straightforward search:

> kpsewhich article.cls
   /usr/local/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
We are looking for the file article.cls. Since the ‘.cls’ suffix is unambiguous we do not need to specify that we want to look for a file of type tex (TEX source file directories). We find it in the subdirectory tex/latex/base below the ‘texmf-distTEX Live directory. Similarly, all of the following are found without problems thanks to their unambiguous suffix.

> kpsewhich array.sty
   /usr/local/texmf-dist/tex/latex/tools/array.sty
> kpsewhich latin1.def
   /usr/local/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/latin1.def
> kpsewhich size10.clo
   /usr/local/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo
> kpsewhich small2e.tex
   /usr/local/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/small2e.tex
> kpsewhich tugboat.bib
   /usr/local/texmf-dist/bibtex/bib/beebe/tugboat.bib

By the way, that last is a BibTeX bibliography database for TUGboat articles.

> kpsewhich cmr10.pk
Font bitmap glyph files of type .pk are used by display programs like dvips and xdvi. Nothing is returned in this case since there are no pre-generated Computer Modern ‘.pk’ files in TEX Live — the Type 1 variants are used by default.

> kpsewhich wsuipa10.pk
   /usr/local/texmf-var/fonts/pk/ljfour/public/wsuipa/wsuipa10.600pk
For these fonts (a phonetic alphabet from the University of Washington) we had to generate ‘.pk’ files, and since the default Metafont mode on our installation is ljfour with a base resolution of 600dpi (dots per inch), this instantiation is returned.

> kpsewhich -dpi=300 wsuipa10.pk
In this case, when specifying that we are interested in a resolution of 300dpi (-dpi=300) we see that no such font is available on the system. A program like dvips or xdvi would go off and actually build the required .pk files using the script mktexpk.

Next we turn our attention to dvips’s header and configuration files. We first look at one of the commonly used files, the general prologue tex.pro for TEX support, before turning our attention to the generic configuration file (config.ps) and the PostScript font map psfonts.map — as of 2004, map and encoding files have their own search paths and new location in texmf trees. As the ‘.ps’ suffix is ambiguous we have to specify explicitly which type we are considering (dvips config) for the file config.ps.

> kpsewhich tex.pro
   /usr/local/texmf/dvips/base/tex.pro
> kpsewhich --format="dvips config" config.ps
   /usr/local/texmf/dvips/config/config.ps
> kpsewhich psfonts.map
   /usr/local/texmf/fonts/map/dvips/updmap/psfonts.map

We now take a closer look at the URW Times PostScript support files. The prefix for these in the standard font naming scheme is ‘utm’. The first file we look at is the configuration file, which contains the name of the map file:

> kpsewhich --format="dvips config" config.utm
   /usr/local/texmf-dist/dvips/psnfss/config.utm
The contents of that file is

  p +utm.map
which points to the file utm.map, which we want to locate next.

> kpsewhich utm.map
   /usr/local/texmf-dist/fonts/map/dvips/times/utm.map
This map file defines the file names of the Type 1 PostScript fonts in the URW collection. Its contents look like (we only show part of the lines):

utmb8r  NimbusRomNo9L-Medi    ... <utmb8a.pfb
utmbi8r NimbusRomNo9L-MediItal... <utmbi8a.pfb
utmr8r  NimbusRomNo9L-Regu    ... <utmr8a.pfb
utmri8r NimbusRomNo9L-ReguItal... <utmri8a.pfb
utmbo8r NimbusRomNo9L-Medi    ... <utmb8a.pfb
utmro8r NimbusRomNo9L-Regu    ... <utmr8a.pfb
Let us, for instance, take the Times Roman instance utmr8a.pfb and find its position in the texmf directory tree with a search for Type 1 font files:

> kpsewhich utmr8a.pfb
   /usr/local/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/urw/times/utmr8a.pfb

It should be evident from these examples how you can easily locate the whereabouts of a given file. This is especially important if you suspect that the wrong version of a file is picked up somehow, since kpsewhich will show you the first file encountered.

8.2.4 Debugging actions

Sometimes it is necessary to investigate how a program resolves file references. To make this practical, Kpathsea offers various levels of debugging output:

 1

stat calls (disk lookups). When running with an up-to-date ls-R database this should almost give no output.

 2

References to hash tables (such as ls-R databases, map files, configuration files).

 4

File open and close operations.

 8

General path information for file types searched by Kpathsea. This is useful to find out where a particular path for the file was defined.

16

Directory list for each path element (only relevant for searches on disk).

32

File searches.

64

Variable values.

A value of -1 will set all the above options; in practice, this is usually the most convenient.

Similarly, with the dvips program, by setting a combination of debug switches, one can follow in detail where files are being picked up from. Alternatively, when a file is not found, the debug trace shows in which directories the program looks for the given file, so that one can get an indication what the problem is.

Generally speaking, as most programs call the Kpathsea library internally, one can select a debug option by using the KPATHSEA_DEBUG environment variable, and setting it to (a combination of) values as described in the above list.

(Note for Windows users: it is not easy to redirect all messages to a file in this system. For diagnostic purposes you can temporarily SET KPATHSEA_DEBUG_OUTPUT=err.log).

Let us consider, as an example, a small LATEX source file, hello-world.tex, which contains the following input.

    \documentclass{article}
    \begin{document}
    Hello World!
    \end{document}

This little file only uses the font cmr10, so let us look at how dvips prepares the PostScript file (we want to use the Type 1 version of the Computer Modern fonts, hence the option -Pcms).

> dvips -d4100 hello-world -Pcms -o
In this case we have combined dvips’s debug class 4 (font paths) with Kpathsea’s path element expansion (see dvips Reference Manual, texmf/doc/dvips/dvips.pdf). The output (slightly rearranged) appears in Figure 12.


debug:start search(file=texmf.cnf, must_exist=1, find_all=1,
  path=.:/usr/local/bin/texlive:/usr/local/bin:
       /usr/local/bin/texmf/web2c:/usr/local:
       /usr/local/texmf/web2c:/.:/./teTeX/TeX/texmf/web2c:).
kdebug:start search(file=ls-R, must_exist=1, find_all=1,
  path=~/tex:/usr/local/texmf).
kdebug:search(ls-R) =>/usr/local/texmf/ls-R
kdebug:start search(file=aliases, must_exist=1, find_all=1,
  path=~/tex:/usr/local/texmf).
kdebug:search(aliases) => /usr/local/texmf/aliases
kdebug:start search(file=config.ps, must_exist=0, find_all=0,
  path=.:~/tex:!!/usr/local/texmf/dvips//).
kdebug:search(config.ps) => /usr/local/texmf/dvips/config/config.ps
kdebug:start search(file=/root/.dvipsrc, must_exist=0, find_all=0,
  path=.:~/tex:!!/usr/local/texmf/dvips//).
search(file=/home/goossens/.dvipsrc, must_exist=1, find_all=0,
  path=.:~/tex/dvips//:!!/usr/local/texmf/dvips//).
kdebug:search($HOME/.dvipsrc) =>
kdebug:start search(file=config.cms, must_exist=0, find_all=0,
  path=.:~/tex/dvips//:!!/usr/local/texmf/dvips//).
kdebug:search(config.cms)
=>/usr/local/texmf/dvips/cms/config.cms
Figure 12: Finding configuration files
kdebug:start search(file=texc.pro, must\_exist=0, find\_all=0,
  path=.:~/tex/dvips//:!!/usr/local/texmf/dvips//:
       ~/tex/fonts/type1//:!!/usr/local/texmf/fonts/type1//).
kdebug:search(texc.pro) => /usr/local/texmf/dvips/base/texc.pro
Figure 13: Finding the prolog file
kdebug:start search(file=cmr10.tfm, must\_exist=1, find\_all=0,
  path=.:~/tex/fonts/tfm//:!!/usr/local/texmf/fonts/tfm//:
       /var/tex/fonts/tfm//).
kdebug:search(cmr10.tfm) => /usr/local/texmf/fonts/tfm/public/cm/cmr10.tfm
kdebug:start search(file=texps.pro, must\_exist=0, find\_all=0,
   ...
<texps.pro>
kdebug:start search(file=cmr10.pfb, must\_exist=0, find\_all=0,
  path=.:~/tex/dvips//:!!/usr/local/texmf/dvips//:
       ~/tex/fonts/type1//:!!/usr/local/texmf/fonts/type1//).
kdebug:search(cmr10.pfb) => /usr/local/texmf/fonts/type1/public/cm/cmr10.pfb
<cmr10.pfb>[1]
Figure 14: Finding the font file

dvips starts by locating its working files. First, texmf.cnf is found, which gives the definitions of the search paths for the other files, then the file database ls-R (to optimize file searching) and the file aliases, which makes it possible to declare several names (e.g., a short DOS-like 8.3 and a more natural longer version) for the same file. Then dvips goes on to find the generic configuration file config.ps before looking for the customization file .dvipsrc (which, in this case is not found). Finally, dvips locates the config file for the Computer Modern PostScript fonts config.cms (this was initiated with the -Pcms option on the dvips command). This file contains the list of the map files which define the relation between the TEX, PostScript and file system names of the fonts.

> more /usr/local/texmf/dvips/cms/config.cms
   p +ams.map
   p +cms.map
   p +cmbkm.map
   p +amsbkm.map
dvips thus goes on to find all these files, plus the generic map file psfonts.map, which is always loaded (it contains declarations for commonly used PostScript fonts; see the last part of Section 8.2.3 for more details about PostScript map file handling).

At this point dvips identifies itself to the user:

This is dvips(k) 5.92b Copyright 2002 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com)
Then it goes on to look for the prolog file texc.pro:


kdebug:start search(file=texc.pro, must_exist=0, find_all=0,
  path=.:~/tex/dvips//:!!/usr/local/texmf/dvips//:
       ~/tex/fonts/type1//:!!/usr/local/texmf/fonts/type1//).
kdebug:search(texc.pro) => /usr/local/texmf/dvips/base/texc.pro

After having found the file in question, dvips outputs the date and time, and informs us that it will generate the file hello-world.ps, then that it needs the font file cmr10, and that the latter is declared as “resident” (no bitmaps needed):


TeX output 1998.02.26:1204’ -> hello-world.ps
Defining font () cmr10 at 10.0pt
Font cmr10 <CMR10> is resident.
Now the search is on for the file cmr10.tfm, which is found, then a few more prolog files (not shown) are referenced, and finally the Type 1 instance cmr10.pfb of the font is located and included in the output file (see last line).


kdebug:start search(file=cmr10.tfm, must_exist=1, find_all=0,
  path=.:~/tex/fonts/tfm//:!!/usr/local/texmf/fonts/tfm//:
       /var/tex/fonts/tfm//).
kdebug:search(cmr10.tfm) => /usr/local/texmf/fonts/tfm/public/cm/cmr10.tfm
kdebug:start search(file=texps.pro, must_exist=0, find_all=0,
   ...
<texps.pro>
kdebug:start search(file=cmr10.pfb, must_exist=0, find_all=0,
  path=.:~/tex/dvips//:!!/usr/local/texmf/dvips//:
       ~/tex/fonts/type1//:!!/usr/local/texmf/fonts/type1//).
kdebug:search(cmr10.pfb) => /usr/local/texmf/fonts/type1/public/cm/cmr10.pfb
<cmr10.pfb>[1]

8.3 Runtime options

Another useful feature of Web2C is its possibility to control a number of memory parameters (in particular, array sizes) via the runtime file texmf.cnf read by Kpathsea. The memory settings can be found in Part 3 of that file in the TEX Live distribution. The more important are:

main_memory

Total words of memory available, for TEX, Metafont and MetaPost. You must make a new format file for each different setting. For instance, you could generate a “huge” version of TEX, and call the format file hugetex.fmt. Using the standard way of specifying the program name used by Kpathsea, the particular value of the main_memory variable will then be read from texmf.cnf.

extra_mem_bot

Extra space for “large” TEX data structures: boxes, glue, breakpoints, etc. Especially useful if you use PI CTEX.

font_mem_size

Number of words for font information available for TEX. This is more or less the total size of all TFM files read.

hash_extra

Additional space for the hash table of control sequence names. Only 10,000 control sequences can be stored in the main hash table; if you have a large book with numerous cross-references, this might not be enough. The default value of hash_extra is 50000.

Of course, this facility is no substitute for truly dynamic arrays and memory allocation, but since these are extremely difficult to implement in the present TEX source, these runtime parameters provide a practical compromise allowing some flexibility.

9 Acknowledgements

TEX Live is a joint effort by virtually all of the TEX user groups. This edition of TEX Live was overseen by Karl Berry. The other principal contributors, past and present, are listed below.

Builders of the binaries: Peter Breitenlohner (x86_64-linux), Karl Berry (i386-linux, sparc-linux), Ken Brown (i386-cygwin), Akira Kakuto (win32), Dick Koch (universal-darwin), Norbert Preining (alpha-linux), Jukka Salmi (i386-netbsd), Thomas Schmitz (powerpc-linux), Apostolos Syropoulos (i386-solaris), Vladimir Volovich (powerpc-aix, sparc-solaris), Olaf Weber (mips-irix). For information on the TEX Live build process, see http://tug.org/texlive/build.html.

Current documentation translators: Jjgod Jiang, Jinsong Zhao, Yue Wang, & Helin Gai (Chinese), Klaus Höppner (German), Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard (French), Petr Sojka & Jan Busa (Czech/Slovak), Boris Veytsman (Russian), Staszek Wawrykiewicz (Polish). The TEX Live documentation web page is http://tug.org/texlive/doc.html.

Of course the most important acknowledgement must go to Donald Knuth, first for inventing TEX, and then for giving it to the world.

10 Release history

10.1 Past

Discussion began in late 1993 when the Dutch TEX Users Group was starting work on its 4AllTEX CD for MS-DOS users, and it was hoped at that time to issue a single, rational, CD for all systems. This was too ambitious a target for the time, but it did spawn not only the very successful 4AllTEX CD, but also the TUG Technical Council working group on a TEX Directory Structure (http://tug.org/tds), which specified how to create consistent and manageable collections of TEX support files. A complete draft of the TDS was published in the December 1995 issue of TUGboat, and it was clear from an early stage that one desirable product would be a model structure on CD. The distribution you now have is a very direct result of the working group’s deliberations. It was also clear that the success of the 4AllTEX CD showed that Unix users would benefit from a similarly easy system, and this is the other main strand of TEX Live.

We first undertook to make a new Unix-based TDS CD in the autumn of 1995, and quickly identified Thomas Esser’s teTEX as the ideal setup, as it already had multi-platform support and was built with portability across file systems in mind. Thomas agreed to help, and work began seriously at the start of 1996. The first edition was released in May 1996. At the start of 1997, Karl Berry completed a major new release of Web2c, which included nearly all the features which Thomas Esser had added in teTEX, and we decided to base the 2nd edition of the CD on the standard Web2C, with the addition of teTEX’s texconfig script. The 3rd edition of the CD was based on a major revision of Web2C, 7.2, by Olaf Weber; at the same time, a new revision of teTEX was being made, and TEX Live included almost all of its features. The 4th edition followed the same pattern, using a new version of teTEX, and a new release of Web2C (7.3). The system now included a complete Windows setup.

For the 5th edition (March 2000) many parts of the CD were revised and checked, updating hundreds of packages. Package details were stored in XML files. But the major change for TEX Live 5 was that all non-free software was removed. Everything in TEX Live is now intended to be compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (http://www.debian.org/intro/free); we have done our best to check the license conditions of all packages, but we would very much appreciate hearing of any mistakes.

The 6th edition (July 2001) had much more material updated. The major change was a new install concept: the user could select a more exact set of needed collections. Language-related collections were completely reorganized, so selecting any of them installs not only macros, fonts, etc., but also prepares an appropriate language.dat.

The 7th edition of 2002 had the notable addition of Mac OS X support, and the usual myriad of updates to all sorts of packages and programs. An important goal was integration of the source back with teTEX, to correct the drift apart in versions 5 and 6.

10.1.1 2003

In 2003, with the continuing flood of updates and additions, we found that TEX Live had grown so large it could no longer be contained on a single CD, so we split it into three different distributions (see section 2.1, p. 6). In addition:

10.1.2 2004

2004 saw many changes:

10.1.3 2005

2005 saw the usual huge number of updates to packages and programs. The infrastructure stayed relatively stable from 2004, but inevitably there were some changes there as well:

10.1.4 2006–2007

In 2006–2007, the major new addition to TEX Live was the XeTEX program, available as the xetex and xelatex programs; see http://scripts.sil.org/xetex.

MetaPost also received a notable update, with more planned for the future (http://tug.org/metapost/articles), likewise pdfTEX (http://tug.org/applications/pdftex).

The TEX .fmt (high-speed format) and the similar files for MetaPost and Metafont are now stored in subdirectories of texmf/web2c, instead of in the directory itself (although the directory is still searched, for the sake of existing .fmt’s). The subdirectories are named for the ‘engine’ in use, such as tex or pdftex or xetex. This change should be invisible in normal use.

The (plain) tex program no longer reads %& first lines to determine what format to run; it is the pure Knuthian TEX. (LATEX and everything else do still read %& lines).

Of course the year also saw (the usual) hundreds of other updates to packages and programs. As usual, please check CTAN (http://www.ctan.org) for updates.

Internally, the source tree is now stored in Subversion, with a standard web interface for viewing the tree, as linked from our home page. Although not visible in the final distribution, we expect this will provide a stable development foundation for future years.

Finally, in May 2006 Thomas Esser announced that he would no longer be updating teTEX (http://tug.org/tetex). As a result, there was been a surge of interest in TEX Live, especially among GNU/Linux distributors. (There is a new tetex installation scheme in TEX Live, which provides an approximate equivalent.) We hope this will eventually translate to improvements in the TEX environment for everyone.

10.1.5 2008

In 2008, the entire TEX Live infrastructure was redesigned and reimplemented. Complete information about an installation is now stored in a plain text file tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb.

Among other things, this finally makes possible upgrading a TEX Live installation over the Internet after the initial installation, a feature MiKTEX has provided for many years. We expect to regularly update new packages as they are released to CTAN.

The major new engine LuaTEX (http://luatex.org) is included; besides a new level of flexibility in typesetting, this provides an excellent scripting language for use both inside and outside of TEX documents.

Support among Windows and the Unix-based platforms is now much more uniform. In particular, most Perl and Lua scripts are now available on Windows, using the Perl internally distributed with TEX Live.

The new tlmgr script (section 6) is the general interface for managing TEX Live after the initial installation. It handles package updates and consequent regeneration of formats, map files, and language files, optionally including local additions.

With the advent of tlmgr, the texconfig actions to edit the format and hyphenation configuration files are now disabled.

The xindy indexing program (http://xindy.sourceforge.net/) is now included on most platforms.

The kpsewhich tool can now report all matches for a given file (option –all) and limit matches to a given subdirectory (option –subdir).

The dvipdfmx program now includes functionality to extract bounding box information, via the command name extractbb; this was one of the last features provided by dvipdfm not in dvipdfmx.

The font aliases Times-Roman, Helvetica, and so on have been removed. Different packages expected them to behave differently (in particular, to have different encodings), and there was no good way to resolve this.

The platex format has been removed, to resolve a name conflict with a completely different Japanese platex; the polski package is now the main Polish support.

Internally, the WEB string pool files are now compiled into the binaries, to ease upgrades.

Finally, the changes made by Donald Knuth in his ‘TEX tuneup of 2008’ are included in this release. See http://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb29-2/tb92knut.pdf.

10.2 Present

In 2009, the default output format for Lua(LA )TEX is now PDF, to take advantage of LuaTEX’s OpenType support, et al. New executables named dviluatex and dvilualatex run LuaTEX with DVI output. The LuaTEX home page is http://luatex.org.

The original Omega engine and Lambda format have been excised, after discussions with the Omega authors. The updated Aleph and Lamed remain, as do the Omega utilities.

A new release of the AMS Type 1 fonts is included, including Computer Modern: a few shape changes made over the years by Knuth in the Metafont sources have been integrated, and the hinting has been updated. The Euler fonts have been thoroughly reshaped by Hermann Zapf (see http://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb29-2/tb92hagen-euler.pdf). In all cases, the metrics remain unchanged. The AMS fonts home page is http://www.ams.org/tex/amsfonts.html.

The new GUI front end TEXworks is included for Windows, and also in MacTEX. For other platforms, and more information, see the TEXworks home page, http://tug.org/texworks. It is a cross-platform front end inspired by the Mac OS X TeXShop editor, aiming at ease-of-use.

The graphics program Asymptote is included for several platforms. This implements a text-based graphics description language vaguely akin to MetaPost, but with advanced 3D support and other features. Its home page is http://asymptote.sourceforge.net.

The separate dvipdfm program has been replaced by dvipdfmx, which operates in a special compatibility mode under that name. dvipdfmx includes CJK support and has accumulated many other fixes over the years since the last dvipdfm release. The DVIPDFMx home page is http://project.ktug.or.kr/dvipdfmx.

Executables for the cygwin and i386-netbsd platforms are now included, while the other BSD distributions have been dropped; we were advised that OpenBSD and FreeBSD users get TEX through their package systems, plus there were difficulties in making binaries that have a chance of working on more than one version.

A miscellany of smaller changes: we now use xz compression, the stable replacement for lzma (http://tukaani.org/xz/); a literal $ is allowed in filenames when it does not introduce a known variable name; the Kpathsea library is now multi-threaded (made use of in MetaPost); the entire TEX Live build is now based on Automake.

Final note on the past: all releases of TEX Live, along with ancillary material such as CD labels, are available at ftp://tug.org/historic/systems/texlive.

10.3 Future

TEX Live is not perfect! (And never will be.) We intend to continue to release new versions, and would like to provide more help material, more utilities, more installation programs, and (of course) an ever-improved and better-checked tree of macros and fonts. This work is all done by hard-pressed volunteers in their limited spare time, and a great deal remains to be done. Please see http://tug.org/texlive/contribute.html.

Please send corrections, suggestions, and offers of help to:

tex-live@tug.org
http://tug.org/texlive

Happy TEXing!