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TeX and LaTeX really confuse me. I know that there is no official distribution, and that it's a bit like Linux in that there are many packagers and distributions. A lot of the distributions that people suggest to me seem to have lost their maintainers (TeTex for example). There are also different options available within those distributions for converting to pdf and so on.

What is the current consensus, the state of the art, the done thing? Is there a consensus in the first place?

Which distribution should I use (on Mac, via ports if that matters)?

What workflow (commands, tools) should I use to convert latex to pdf?

Thanks.

Bob Bobson
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On Mac, the only distribution that matters is TeX Live, more specifically their Mac version called MacTex.

This distribution is very active and state of the art.

For more questions about the differences and respective advantages of TeX engines and distributions, I suggest asking a question on tex.stackexchange.com.

What workflow (commands, tools) should I use to convert latex to pdf?

In the simplest case, it’s quite enough to invoke the processor (e.g. pdflatex, or better luatex or xelatex) directly. In more sophisticated cases (e.g. you’ve got a bibliography or an index, or are using cross-references), this would require multiple passes, and running other software in between. For these cases, there exist a host of built tools for LaTeX. The simplest is probably just to use latexmk which ships with TeX Live.

Community
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Konrad Rudolph
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I know that there is no official distribution

Most folks would agree that http://www.tug.org/texlive/ is the official distribution.

Which distribution should I use (on Mac, via ports if that matters)?

That one.

What workflow (commands, tools) should I use to convert latex to pdf?

Click on the "typeset" button. Seriously. It's just that complex.

S.Lott
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While I agree with TeXlive (MacTeX) as the "official" distro, I disagree with "just click typeset."

LaTeX is a very powerful tool and one that needs some time to learn its intricacies, including compiling. For that task I recommend the script latexmk-pdf filename.tex as it does most of the hard work. I also always recommend the LaTeX wikibook and the AMS short math guide for learning LaTeX and for quick reference.

Joel Berger
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On Windows, I feel MiKTeX is fairly standard and also free based on my own experience and other people's review. One of the nice features of MiKTeX that I like is that you can download and install missing packages on the fly, therefore making the cost of installing new package minimum and giving you the max flexibility of choosing whatever (officially) available packages that fit your doc need.

Below is a list of relevant latex links that I collected/copied from somewhere (maybe outdated now). Hope it helps:

****** LaTex/Tex Compiler ********** MikTex: http://miktex.org/ teTex: http://www.tug.org/tetex/

***** LaTex/Tex Editor ********** Vim: http://www.vim.org/ TexNicCenter: http://www.texniccenter.org/ WinEdt: http://www.winedt.com/ LyX: http://www.lyx.org/ WinShell: http://www.winshell.de/ (X)Emax + AUCTEX: http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/ texmaker: http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/ TeXShop: http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/ LEd: http://www.latexeditor.org/

***** Spelling & Grammar Checker ***** queequeg: http://queequeg.sourceforge.net/index-e.html

***** Related Image Converter/Editer ** IPE: http://tclab.kaist.ac.kr/ipe/ jpeg2ps: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/jpeg2ps/ eps2pdf: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/eps2pdf/ XFig: http://www.xfig.org/ TGIF: http://bourbon.usc.edu/tgif/download.html

**** Bibliography Management ******** JabRef: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jabref/ wbibdb22: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/bibdb/ LaTeX Bibliography Styles Database: http://jo.irisson.free.fr/bstdatabase/

**** Documentation ********* Latex Help 1.4: http://www.emerson.emory.edu/services/latex/latex2e/latex2e_toc.html Not so short LaTeX guide: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List: ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/info /symbols/comprehensive/symbols-letter.pdf LaTeX Mathematical Symbols: http://amath.colorado.edu/documentation/LaTeX/Symbols.pdf Short Math Guide for LaTeX: ftp://ftp.ams.org/pub/tex/doc/amsmath/short-math -guide.pdf

*** Integration with Other Tools ***** Tex4PPT: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/srg/softwaretools/presentation/TeX4PPT/

SDE
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  • A list of all available editors is collected at http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/339/latex-editors-ides. Thereby, [TeXstudio](http://texstudio.sourceforge.net/) also supports Grammar check via [Languagetool](https://www.languagetool.org/). – koppor Nov 22 '15 at 22:27