LaTeX packages

Now that you have a good editor to work on, your next step is to install a proper LaTeX compiler package on your machine. The choice is to be different on different OS. Here we provide information on installation choices that are most popular among many people.

On Windows

The MiKTeX compiler is one of the most popular open source libraries (i.e., free) for Windows. You can simply follow the instructions at the website to install on your PC.

As mentioned, if you are to use a DVI-to-PostScript converter dvips in buidling LaTeX documents, you would need to install Ghostscript separately after installing MikTeX. You can live without Ghostscript if you don’t output your documents into a PostScript format, but directly to a PDF format using pdflatex.

You can find general tips on installing LaTeX on Windows here:

For more information, please see:

On Mac

You will need to install two things on your Mac:

  • TeXShop
    • This is a front-end (or a user interface) to LaTeX, which means that users produce LaTeX documents by editing documents on TeXShop which calls command line programs in an underlying LaTeX distribution.
    • download
  • MacTeX
    • This is the most popular LaTeX distribution (> 2GB!) for Mac OS X. The package also installs TeXShop, a good LaTeX interface where you can edit and build your documents. In case TeXShop doesn’t get installed upon installing MacTeX you can install TeXShop separately.

You can find general tips on installing LaTeX on Mac OS X here:

On Linux

The installation process on Linux is much lighter and easier because most of the Linux distributions comes with a pre-installed TeX distribution. All you need is to update your current TeX to have full major TeX capabilities that might not be included in your default TeX distribution.

To do this is simple: you will only need to install TeX Live which can be downloaded directly from their main website.

Another easy way to download it is to use a Linux command line apt-get:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install texlive-full

More reading

For more instructions on obtaining and installing various OS, please read: