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TeX Live

In-depth entry

by TeX Users Group (TUG) · Platform · also known as TeXLive, MacTeX

The comprehensive free TeX distribution for Linux, macOS and Windows, released yearly with the tlmgr package manager and all major engines, packages and fonts

Open sourceFreeOpen sourceLocalSelf-hostedSelf-hostable
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Link verified Nov 2, 2026

Overview

TeX Live is the reference distribution of the TeX typesetting system, produced since 1996 by the TeX Users Group together with other user groups. One installation provides the engines (pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX, plain TeX, ConTeXt), the LaTeX kernel and essentially every free package and font available on CTAN, plus the supporting programs: BibTeX and Biber for bibliographies, makeindex and xindy, dvips and dvipdfmx, and language support for scripts worldwide. On macOS it is packaged as MacTeX, and most Linux distributions ship it through their own package managers.

A new release appears each year around March; during the year the TeX Live Manager, tlmgr, pulls package updates from the CTAN mirror network until the release is frozen ahead of the next version. The installer allows full or scheme-based installations, custom repositories, portable USB installs and automated deployments, which matters for reproducible builds on continuous-integration runners and compute clusters. Overleaf's self-hosted images and most LaTeX editors (TeXstudio, VS Code LaTeX Workshop) assume a TeX Live installation.

Licensing is per package: everything in TeX Live is free software by the maintainers' policy, but the collection mixes the LaTeX Project Public License, GPL, BSD-style and font licences, so there is no single SPDX identifier for the whole distribution. The main drawbacks are size (a full install is several gigabytes), the yearly re-installation needed to move to a new release, and the fact that package updates can occasionally break existing documents, which is why pinned-year installations are common in reproducible workflows.

Editorial note on uncertainty. No single license_spdx is recorded because TeX Live is a collection with per-package licences (LPPL, GPL, BSD and others).

Capabilities

  • Engines: pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX, ConTeXt
  • Near-complete CTAN package and font collection
  • tlmgr package manager with mirror updates
  • Scheme-based, portable and unattended installs
  • BibTeX, Biber, makeindex and other support tools
  • MacTeX packaging for macOS
  • Yearly releases with frozen archives of earlier years
  • Multilingual hyphenation and font support

Typical workflows

  1. Compiling a thesis or paper locally with latexmk
  2. Pinned TeX Live year in a Docker image for CI builds
  3. Serving as the compile backend for a self-hosted Overleaf
  4. Installing a minimal scheme on a compute node and adding packages with tlmgr

Strengths

  • Complete and consistent across platforms
  • Free software throughout
  • Stable yearly release cadence
  • Scriptable installation for automation

Limitations

  • Full installation is several gigabytes
  • Moving to a new release requires reinstalling
  • Rolling package updates can change document output
  • Mixed per-package licences; no single SPDX identifier

Prerequisites

  • Disk space of several gigabytes for a full install
  • Perl for the installer and tlmgr

Who it is for

  • Academic authors using LaTeX
  • Administrators of build servers and clusters
  • Developers of document pipelines (Pandoc, Quarto, R Markdown)

Alternatives & comparison

MiKTeX is the other major free TeX distribution and installs packages on demand, whereas TeX Live favours complete installs and yearly releases. Overleaf hosts TeX Live in the cloud so users avoid local installation; Typst is a separate typesetting system that does not depend on TeX at all.

  • Overleaf

    Collaborative online LaTeX editor with real-time co-editing, templates and reference-manager sync, available as a hosted service and an AGPL self-hosted edition

    Open sourceFreemium
  • Pandoc

    Universal document converter that translates between Markdown, LaTeX, HTML, DOCX, EPUB, Typst, Jupyter and dozens of other formats, with citeproc and Lua filters

    Open sourceFree
  • TeXstudio

    Open-source desktop LaTeX editor with integrated PDF viewer, autocompletion, wizards, spell checking and a structure view for Windows, macOS and Linux

    Open sourceFree
  • Typst

    Markup-based typesetting system with an Apache-2.0 compiler written in Rust and a collaborative web app, positioned as a faster, simpler alternative to LaTeX

    MixedFree
Compare TeX Live with its alternatives →

Sources & verification

Primary sources consulted for this record. Claims are tied to the fields each source supports; the automated link checker re-verifies every URL on a schedule.

  • License
    TeX Live licensing, copying, and redistribution

    https://tug.org/texlive/copying.html

    Supports: source_model, limitations

    Explains that components carry individual free-software licences

    checked Nov 1, 2026
  • Official documentation
    TeX Live documentation

    https://tug.org/texlive/doc.html

    Supports: capabilities, docs_url

    checked Nov 1, 2026
  • Official site
    TeX Live - TeX Users Group

    https://tug.org/texlive

    Supports: name, summary, description, operating_systems

    States the current release and yearly schedule

    checked Nov 1, 2026
Confidence
High
Reviewed
Nov 1, 2026
Links
Verified · Nov 2, 2026

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