The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network

The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN) is the central place for all kinds of material around TeX. CTAN has currently 6824 packages. 3102 contributors have contributed to it. Most of the packages are free and can be downloaded and used immediately.

Announcements on CTAN-announce

You can see what's new and even get informed about new or updated packages on CTAN.

Activity on CTAN

An active TeX community takes care that CTAN is updated and extended regularly. CTAN receives usually more than 100 uploads per month.

Search on CTAN

The contents of CTAN can be searched with full-text search. This search considers the description, the documentation, and the contributors.

If you want to have finer control on the parameters of the search you can use the advanced search form instead.

Browse CTAN

This Web interface to CTAN provides a view on the directories and files in the archive. The files and some directories as a whole can be immediately be downloaded. You can immediately go to the

Contribute to CTAN

CTAN lives from the contributions of software and package contributors. Thus you are strongly encouraged to submit your contribution to the TeX world to CTAN. You can use a Web form to upload your contribution:

upload form

Background of CTAN

If you are interested in the background of the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network you can read more on

Did you know?

The topic Box breaking in the TeX Catalogue has 6 packages for breaking boxes over a page boundary, etc..

TeX

TeX is a typesetting program designed for high-quality composition of material that contains a lot of mathematical and technical expressions. It has been adopted by many authors and publishers who generate technical books and papers. It was created by Professor Donald E.Knuth of Stanford University, originally for preparation of his book series “The Art of Computer Programming”. TeX has been made freely available by Knuth.

From these origins a whole eco-system of distributions, macro packages, and supporting programs has arisen.

Download a TeX System

CTAN provides complete ready-to run TeX systems for various platforms:

TeX Live a cross-platform TeX system. It includes support for most Unix-like systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
MacTeX an easy to install TeX system for Mac OS X, based on TeX Live. It also includes a native Mac installer, the TeXShop front-end, and additional Mac-specific tools.

User Groups

Many users of TeX and friends have formed user groups. The following ones are mentioned because they support CTAN.

The TeX Users Group (TUG) is a not-for-profit organization by, for, and of its members, also representing the interests of TeX users worldwide.

The Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX e.V. (DANTE) is the TeX users group for German speaking TeX users.