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CTAN Mirrors with MacTeX



MacTeX is distributed by a large number of CTAN servers across the world. The main MacTeX link is a multiplexer which chooses a site near you, while trying to even out the load during periods of heavy usage. But sometimes you want to go to a particular site.

The page

www.ctan.org/mirrors/mirmon

contains a list of CTAN mirror sites with information on how recently each site was updated.

Some sites are http servers and some are ftp servers. Pick an http server close to you, and click on the server address in the mirror page.

Most sites will initially show an index page. Find "systems" on this page. The "mac" site location is not listed as a subfolder of systems, but clicking on "systems" will lead to a very large list containing "mac". Click on "mac" to see the contents of "mactex" on CTAN.

In the MacTeX folder on CTAN, MacTeX.pkg is a symbolic link to the latest version of MacTeX. That actual file is also in the folder with a creation date. Clicking on either the link or the file will download it.

This MacTeX folder also contains BasicTeX, Ghostscript, and MacTeXtras as optional downloads. See other pages of this website for an explanation of these packages.


Happy TeXing on macOS !

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