spb/tools-spboucher-ai

1{2  "slug": "tex-live",3  "name": "TeX Live",4  "aliases": ["TeXLive", "MacTeX"],5  "vendor": { "name": "TeX Users Group (TUG)", "slug": "tug", "website": "https://tug.org" },6  "homepage_url": "https://tug.org/texlive/",7  "docs_url": "https://tug.org/texlive/doc.html",8  "license_url": "https://tug.org/texlive/copying.html",9  "product_type": "platform",10  "product_status": "active",11  "summary": "The comprehensive free TeX distribution for Linux, macOS and Windows, released yearly with the tlmgr package manager and all major engines, packages and fonts",12  "description": "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.\n\nA 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.\n\nLicensing 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.",13  "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"],14  "workflows": ["Compiling a thesis or paper locally with latexmk", "Pinned TeX Live year in a Docker image for CI builds", "Serving as the compile backend for a self-hosted Overleaf", "Installing a minimal scheme on a compute node and adding packages with tlmgr"],15  "advantages": ["Complete and consistent across platforms", "Free software throughout", "Stable yearly release cadence", "Scriptable installation for automation"],16  "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"],17  "prerequisites": ["Disk space of several gigabytes for a full install", "Perl for the installer and tlmgr"],18  "audiences": ["Academic authors using LaTeX", "Administrators of build servers and clusters", "Developers of document pipelines (Pandoc, Quarto, R Markdown)"],19  "alternatives": ["overleaf", "typst", "pandoc"],20  "comparison_notes": "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.",21  "categories": [{ "slug": "latex-typesetting", "primary": true }, { "slug": "reproducibility" }],22  "tags": ["latex", "typesetting", "open-source", "cli", "macos", "documentation"],23  "use_cases": ["typeset-documents", "write-papers"],24  "operating_systems": ["linux", "macos", "windows"],25  "execution_modes": ["local", "self-hosted"],26  "interfaces": ["cli"],27  "deployment_models": ["desktop", "on-premises"],28  "integrations": ["Overleaf (self-hosted)", "TeXstudio", "VS Code LaTeX Workshop", "Pandoc", "Quarto", "R Markdown", "Docker"],29  "data_formats": ["TeX", "LaTeX", "PDF", "DVI", "BibTeX"],30  "languages": ["TeX", "Lua", "Perl"],31  "source_model": "open-source",32  "pricing_model": ["free", "open-source"],33  "self_hostable": true,34  "sources": [35    { "url": "https://tug.org/texlive/", "type": "official_site", "title": "TeX Live - TeX Users Group", "supports": ["name", "summary", "description", "operating_systems"], "checked_at": "2026-11-02", "note": "States the current release and yearly schedule" },36    { "url": "https://tug.org/texlive/doc.html", "type": "official_docs", "title": "TeX Live documentation", "supports": ["capabilities", "docs_url"], "checked_at": "2026-11-02" },37    { "url": "https://tug.org/texlive/copying.html", "type": "license_page", "title": "TeX Live licensing, copying, and redistribution", "supports": ["source_model", "limitations"], "checked_at": "2026-11-02", "note": "Explains that components carry individual free-software licences" }38  ],39  "confidence": "high",40  "uncertainty_note": "No single license_spdx is recorded because TeX Live is a collection with per-package licences (LPPL, GPL, BSD and others).",41  "discovery_method": "editorial-research",42  "depth": "deep",43  "editorial_status": "reviewed",44  "visibility": "public",45  "featured": false,46  "author": "batch-E"47}48