MacTeX-Additions (126.1 MB)
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This page contains an alternate TeX Distribution, BasicTeX, for users who do not want to download the full TeX Live. BasicTeX is a subset of TeX Live 2008; it is incredibly smaller than TeX Live and yet supports most standard TeX typesetting. Like the full TeX Live, BasicTeX runs on PowerPC and Intel machines using systems 10.3, 10.4, or 10.5. BasicTeX does not overwrite the full distribution; it is installed in /usr/local/texlive/2008basic.
To use TeX on the Mac, it suffices to install BasicTeX and a front end. One way to get this front end is to install MacTeX-Additions below; it contains everything in MacTeX-2008 except the TeX Live 2008 distribution. Thus it contains Ghostscript, the "convert" utility from ImageMagick, the Latin Modern and TeX Gyre fonts, and the GUI Applications BibDesk, LaTeXiT, TeXShop, and Excalibur.
But most of these pieces are not really necessary if space is at a premium. Systems 10.4 and above contain an Apple distiller which can be used instead of Ghostscript; the "convert" utility is only required in TeX when you use TeX4ht; you may already have a front end or a favorite editor and PDF display program. Or you might prefer to download a subset of the GUI programs we provide directly from their websites: BibDesk, LaTeXiT, TeXShop, and Excalibur.
MacTeX-Additions (126.1 MB)
MacTeX-Additions contains everything in MacTeX except the actual TeX distribution. Use one of the two links below. These links may not be active for the first few days after MacTeX-2008 is released, as the files migrate to the appropriate server machines.
BasicTeX-2008 (48.8 MB)
BasicTeX is a subset of TeX Live designed for easy download by users with limited download speed. The package is remarkably capable. It contains all of the standard tools needed to write TeX documents, including TeX, LaTeX, pdfTeX, MetaFont, dvips, ConTeXt, MetaPost, and XeTeX. It contains AMSTeX, the Latin Modern Fonts, the TeX Live Manager to add and update packages from TeX Live, and the new SyncTeX.