MacTeX
Distribution of TeX typesetting software for Mac computers
MacTeX is a free redistribution of TeX Live, a typesetting environment based on TeX. While TeX Live is designed to be cross-platform (running on Unix, macOS, and Windows), MacTeX includes Mac-specific utilities and front-ends (such as TeXShop and BibDesk). It is also pre-configured to work out-of-the-box with macOS, as it provides sensible defaults for configuration options that, in TeX Live, are left up to the user to allow for its cross-platform compatibility.
01Details
MacTeX is packaged and distributed by the MacTeX TeXnical working group, a subgroup of TeX Users Group (TUG). TeX Live is distributed by the TUG, making MacTeX less a fork of TeX Live than a customised repackaging.
The full MacTeX install package contains three subpackages:
- TeX Live
- GUI applications
- Ghostscript (an open source version of PostScript)
A substantially smaller version of MacTeX, BasicTeX, which does not contain Ghostscript or the aforementioned GUI programs, can be used instead along with a TeX editor as well. However, it still contains TeX, LaTeX, pdfTeX, MetaFont, dvips, MetaPost, and XeTeX.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “MacTeX”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
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