[Wylug-help] Request for opinion: TeX Distros in Linux

[Roger Leigh]

Dave Fisher <wylug-help at davefisher.co.uk> writes:

> I'd like to resussitate some reports that I wrote many years ago in
> LaTex, using the tetex distro that was bundled with just about every
> Linux distro at the time.
>
> apt-cache search on an Ubuntu sustem reveals a great many more packages
> for the texlive distro, including some experimental LaTeX3 stuff.

Debian (and therefore Ubuntu) provides two TeX systems:

teTeX
TeX Live

teTeX is the traditional one, which is well tested and reliable, but
is not very modular and so takes up a lot of disk space and has a
slower pace of development than TeX Live.

TeX Live is very new in Debian, but probably has some slightly more up
to date components (there's probably not much in it), or a few
components teTeX is missing.  However, the modular TeXLive packaging
may not be as good as the teTeX packaging, which is well tested--it
has been the default (only) TeX system in Debian for many years.

Both are good systems, and both provide pretty much the same thing,
just packaged slightly differently.  There really isn't a great deal
to choose between them.  I'm currently using teTeX, but this is mainly
due to inertia--it's been installed on my system for seven years as
one version or another.

If you are wanting to use old documents, either system should process
them perfectly.  Both systems should work identically.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
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