TeX Live documentation

After you obtain the TeX Live distribution, please read the main documentation for TeX Live, which includes installation instructions for Unix and Windows. For MacOSX, we recommend installing MacTeX, which contains all of TeX Live (and more).

The TeX Live guide is available in several languages and formats (some translations may not be current):

• English documentation - HTML.
• English documentation - PDF.
• Other languages: Simplified Chinese, Czech/Slovak, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish.

If you don't care to read documentation, and just want to install everything, try this quick Unix install recipe, and/or installation for Windows, and/or MacTeX for MacOSX.

Separate pages describe installing/updating packages after the original installation and contributing new packages. Another page describes highlights of changes in this release.

Additional manuals

Components of TeX Live: TL installer (install-tl) - TL manager (tlmgr) - fmtutil - updmap.

Links to additional information and documentation for some of the basic components of the TeX system:
web2c - tds - pdftex - kpathsea - dvips.

TeX Live includes all the documentation provided by individual package and program authors, mostly in the texmf*/doc subdirectories, linked in the top-level doc.html file.

For developers: building TL (pdf), Perl modules.

Supported systems

If you can help by providing binaries for systems not listed here, please see the TeX Live build information. Binaries for the following systems are included in this year's release:

Translations for install-tl and tlmgr

The messages in the TeX Live installer and TeX Live Manager are available in various languages (when running in GUI mode only; we want to keep text mode as simple as possible). If your language is not available and you want to help by providing a translation, or if you want to review the existing translations:

• Copy the messages.pot file to LL.po, where LL is your language code.
• To be able to test, get the TL sources and put LL.po in your Master/tlpkg/translations/ directory.
• Update the header information at the top of the file.
• Translate the strings, either manually or using a PO editor. Instructions and tips for using poedit (a PO editor for Unix and Windows) with TeX Live are available in howto-translations.txt. You can use any editor that suits you.
• To test, run install-tl -gui or install-tl -gui wizard. You can use the option -lang LL to test independently of the system LC_MESSAGES or Windows Registry settings.

Please send new files, bug reports, suggestions, and any other discussion of the translations (of both the manuals and the strings) to tldoc@tug.org.

Volunteer translators

Many people have contributed to the translations over the years. Here is a list of languages and their respective current maintainers; additional help is always welcome, so please send patches and bug reports as needed. And volunteers for other languages are most welcome.

• cs - Petr Sojka
• da - Palle Jørgenson
• de - Uwe Ziegehagen
• en - Karl Berry; Siep Kroonenberg (Windows material)
• es - Carlos Enriquez Figueras
• fr - Denis Bitouzé
• it - Marco Pallante
• ja - Takuto Asakura
• nl - Siep Kroonenberg
• pl - unmaintained; please volunteer
• pt_BR - Paulo Cereda
• ru - Vladimir Lomov, Boris Veytsman
• sk - Jan Busa
• sl - Mojca Miklavec
• sr - Nikola Lečić
• uk - Andriy Bandura
• vi - Anh Huynh
• zh_CN - Wang Ran
• zh_TW - unmaintained; please volunteer