Well, if you have decided to experience the power of the most sophisticated document preparing/publishing software (add to it, the most stable system in this category too! Professor Donald Knuth  declared it to be stable in 1991.), let's see how to get/download it, install it, run it, and prepare your scientific documents. (What about non scientific docs? Of course this is also possible, but our goal is not that!).

Getting LaTeX

As you know, LaTeX  is an open source free software. This means that you can download it paying nothing, copy it, and install it on any number of systems. Equally you may get it easily from one of your collegues or contact a Science(Maths/Physics/Engineering) department in a university nearer to you. Atleast the Math department there must be having a copy of the LaTeX software because it is simply impossible for them to live without it. All the standard Mathematical journals require the articile submission in LaTeX format these days.

Being open source, once you become a TeXpert, you have the opportunity to contribute to the development of LaTeX. You are in fact requested to do so as more and more people joining the contributor list means increasing the quality of the software.

LaTeX installation in Linux

There are several variants of LaTeX just like the variants of Linux. TeTex, TeXLive, fpTeX, MikTeX, MacTeX, etc. In Linux distibutions, TeTeX was the default version available, but it has been now replaced by TeXLive. If you are connected to internet with a really good bandwidth and your downloading costs are relatively low, you may prefer downloading LaTeX and installing it using your Linux distributions software/package manager.

A very good installation manual in Ubuntu Linux is availabe at http://linuxandfriends.com/2009/10/06/install-latex-in-ubuntu-linux. You may use the google search available on the left top of this page to locate the  installation manuals for other Linux distributions.

Enterprise Linux distributions like CentOS, RedHat, Fedora, Debian etc contain TEXLive bundled in their installation CD ROM/DVD. So while installing your OS (or after the installation) you have the option to add the LaTeX also to it.

We will now move towards getting and installing LaTeX in windows.

LaTeX in Windows

Two most popular LaTeX distributions in windows are TeXLive and MikTeX. You can download a full DVD version of TeXLive from this page . You have to download one huge iso file which has size >1GB and burn it to a DVD. If you don't know how to brun an ISO file to a disk, please check this link. This is a live version also, in the sense that you can install minimal software to your hard disk using the DVD and run the entire TeXLive from the DVD drive. This can save a whole lot of disk space in your PC.

If you don't  want to install the full DVD version, you may download a network installer first from this link. Once you start running this installer(which is a windows exe file) it will download the minimum required (depending on your selection) components automatically from the TeXLive website. Remember, LaTeX is a huge software bundle consisting of several packages that you may never use in your life time; this method should be optimal for you for saving bandwidth as well as diskspace.

A detailed how to install TeXLive on Windows, Linux, Mac is available at this link.

For downloading MikTeX too, there are two options; either download the basic installer from this link and while running this installer, select your desired packages and complete the installation. MikTeX is not available as a full cd ISO image. There is an ISO version called ProText which contains the latest MikTeX version.

There is a portable version of MikTeX too available. Please check this link.

Once you download the ProText ISO version, you have to burn it to a CD for using it.

Page last modified on 10^th Dec 2011