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TeX Live - Unix TeX on a CDROM

  Michel Goossens IT/ASD

In May, 1996, the TeX Users Group, the UK TeX Users Group and the French TeX Users Group (GUTenberg), in collaboration with members of other groups and helpful individuals, produced a plug-and-play CD-ROM of Thomas Esser's teTeX, based on Karl Berry's Web2c, with a support tree adhering to the TDS (TeX Directory Structure) tree structure. The programs and files on that CD-ROM are the basis of the TeX-setup at CERN.

A new (second) edition of TeX Live is now available. It contains complete copies of OzTeX, CMacTeX, MikTeX and emTeX, as well as GUTenberg's complete Windows 3.1 distribution. This CD-ROM (and a 32-page installation guide) can be bought from the UCO for 20 CHF.

The contents of the CD

The support tree includes the complete LaTeX December, 1996, patch level 1 release, all tools, and most of the contributed packages on CTAN; format files are provided with the appropriate hyphenation patterns for around 20 languages; other formats include amstex, blue, eplain, lollipop, physsx, psizzl, and text1. Complementary sets of miscellaneous macros are also included. Font families include CM (including the Blue Sky/Y&Y Type 1 versions of the fonts), EC, TC, AMS, Euler, Concrete, and the complete set of PostScript metrics from CTAN.

Source material for all packages, fonts and programs is on the CD.

Documentation is available in at least one (and sometimes all) of dvi, HTML and PDF.

Executables for the following platform/operating system combinations are included:

As the CD-ROM uses the ISO 9660 standard, the platform-independent files can, in principle, be read on all operating systems which are compatible with that format. To preserve the complete Unix/POSIX file system information the file tree was recorded with the Rock Ridge extensions, so that long filenames are honored. Some operating systems, most notably MS-DOS, do not support these extensions, so that only the ISO 9660 filenames are used, but with this limitation, the files are readable on all systems.

A system similar to the one on the CD-ROM will be installed at CERN sometimes after the summer holidays.

More information on the CD-ROM is available at TUG's TeX Live Page. You can also have a look at the manual (PS).

cnl.editor@cern.ch