MacTeX 2011

MacTeX is a product produced by the MacTeX TeXnical working group of the TeX Users Group (TUG).

MacTeX is the Macintosh component of the TeX Collection DVD, the reference edition of TeX distributed by TeX User Groups across the world. The reference edition runs on Mac OS X, Windows, GNU/Linux, various BSD Unix systems, and most other computer architectures.

MacTeX consists of two pieces: MacTeX-2008 and MacTeXtras. MacTeX-2008 is an install package which installs everything needed to run TeX on Mac OS X. The package uses Apple's standard installer; installation takes four to eight minutes and is automatic.

MacTeXtras is basically a collection of optional extras: Spell Checkers, Additional Front Ends, Documentation and Showcase items.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Relatively few changes.
· The Mac OS X binaries (universal-darwin and x86_64-darwin) now work only on Leopard or later; Panther and Tiger are no longer supported.
· The biber program for bibliography processing is included on common platforms. Its development is closely coupled with the biblatex package, which completely reimplements the bibliographical facilities provided by LaTeX.
· The MetaPost (mpost) program no longer creates or uses .mem files. The needed files, such as plain.mp, are simply read on every run. This is related to supporting MetaPost as a library, which is another significant though not user-visible change.
· The updmap implementation in Perl, previously used only on Windows, has been revamped and is now used on all platforms. There shouldn’t be any user-visible changes as a result, except that it runs much faster.