A LATEX Tour , part 1 : the base distribution

2 The Components of LATEX The LATEX distribution at the CTAN archives is organised into the following directories. base Contains the core LATEX files. You need at least these files for a minimal LATEX installation. unpacked Includes all the files in base together with the result of ‘unpacking’ the source files. (More about this later.) Thus when obtaining LATEX you should get either base or unpacked, but not both. Getting the former saves on time transferring the files, but getting the latter saves time that would be taken unpacking the source files, so which is preferable depends on the relative speed (and cost) of your machine and your connection to the archives. packages Consists of seven independent LATEX ‘extensions’ that are written and supported by the LATEX developers (or the American Mathematical Society). amsfonts, amslatex, babel, graphics, mfnfss, psnfss and tools These packages will be described in more detail later in the series. fonts The metafont sources and TEX font metric files of a few fonts that LATEX requires that are not part of the original plain TEX distribution. doc This directory is not part of the main LATEX distribution, it is generated by the CTAN archives. As a convenience for those people that have not yet installed LATEX, some of the main introductory documentation files which are available as LATEX files in the base distribution are made available in this directory as dvi and POSTSCRIPT files. contrib This directory contains an ever growing number of contributed LATEX packages, and other extensions, that have been contributed by LATEX users. They are not part of the ‘official’ LATEX distribution, but many of them form a vital part of any ‘working’ LATEX installation. The packages are divided into two subdirectories ‘supported’ and ‘other’, however at the current time one should ignore this distinction when looking for packages to fetch from the archives. Contrary to expectations some of the best supported packages are distributed (at their author’s request) from contrib/other.