---
title: "TeX Live"
category: "Office, notes and writing"
tagline: "The standard LaTeX distribution, for typesetting papers, books and math."
source: "pacman"
package: "texlive"
command: "pdflatex"
website: "https://tug.org/texlive/"
code: "https://tug.org/texlive/svn/"
---

## What it is

TeX Live is a complete distribution of TeX and LaTeX, the typesetting system used for academic papers, theses, books and anything heavy on mathematics. You write a plain-text `.tex` file with markup for structure and formulas, and LaTeX lays it out as a typeset PDF. TeX Live bundles the engines (pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX, LuaLaTeX), common packages and fonts.

```
pdflatex paper.tex
```

## Why it's here

- **Typesetting that looks right.** Equations, references and page layout come out to publication standard.
- **Pandoc's PDF engine.** Pandoc uses LaTeX to turn Markdown and other formats into PDFs.

## On CoreDesktop

CoreDesktop installs the `texlive` package group from pacman, which brings in the main TeX Live packages. Run `pdflatex`, `xelatex` or `lualatex` in a terminal. `update` keeps it current with the rest of the pacman packages.