TeX is a typesetting language. Instead of visually formatting your text, you enter your manuscript text intertwined with TeX commands in a plain text file. You then run TeX to produce formatted output, such as a PDF file.

The TeX Users Group (TUG) is a membership-based not-for-profit organization, founded in 1980, for anyone who uses the TeX typesetting system created by Donald Knuth and/or is interested in typography and font design.

TeX Live is intended to be a straightforward way to get up and running with the TeX document production system. It provides a comprehensive TeX system with binaries for most flavors of Unix, including GNU/Linux and macOS , and also Windows.

TeX Live 软件发行版为 Unix, Macintosh, Windows 和其他多种平台提供了一套完整的 TeX 系统。它包含了编辑、排版、预览和打印各种语言下 TeX 文档的各类程序，以及 TeX 宏与字体库的庞大集合。

2025年2月13日 · The TeXworks project is an effort to build a simple TeX front-end program (working environment) that will be available for all today's major desktop operating systems—in particular, MS Windows (7/8/8.1/10/11), typical GNU/Linux distros and other X11-based systems, as well as macOS.

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.

With the DVD or the ISO you can install TeX Live without access to the internet. 64- and 32-bit binaries. As of TeX Live 2023, the Windows binaries are 64-bit. 32-bit binaries are not included, since we cannot easily support both together.

TeX Live 2024 was released on March 13. For typical needs, we recommend starting the TeX Live installation by downloading (these links go to mirrors) install-tl-windows.exe for Windows (~20mb), or install-tl-unx.tar.gz (~5mb) for everything else.

If you're looking for a front-end with which to edit files: TeX Live installs TeXworks on Windows, and MacTeX installs TeXShop. A plethora of dedicated TeX editors are also available. In addition, any plain text editor will work.

This page is about acquiring the “original” TeX Live—the version of TeX released by the TeX user groups. If you want to get TeX as it is packaged by the myriad operating system distros, see the information available from the particular distro you want.