Comprehensive TeX Archive Network

The CTAN root directory

This is the root of the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network directory tree. Most information in CTAN is contained in subdirectories:

biblio

Systems for maintaining and presenting bibliographies within documents typeset using TeX

digests

Collections of TeX mailing list digests, TeX-related electronic magazines, and indexes, etc., of printed publications

dviware

Printer drivers and previewers, etc., for .dvi files

fonts

Fonts written in Metafont, and support for using fonts from other sources (e.g., those in Adobe Type 1 format)

graphics

Systems and TeX macros for producing graphics

help

FAQs (de fr uk) and similar direct assistance

indexing

Systems for maintaining and presenting indexes of documents typeset using TeX

info

Manuals and extended how-to information; errata for TeX-related publications, collections of project (e.g., LaTeX and NTS) documents, etc.

install

ZIP files of ready-to-install CTAN packages. The package contained in CTAN directory a/b/c/d/ appears as install/a/b/c/d.tds.zip – each such file may be unzipped directly into a TDS tree, and should contain no “tree prefix”

language

Support for various languages; hyphenation patterns

macros

TeX macros; several directories have significant sub-trees:

context

The ConTeXt distribution and contributed material

generic

Macros that work in several environments

latex

The LaTeX distribution and contributed material

luatex

Macros that require the LuaTeX engine

plain

Donald Knuth's example macro set and contributed material

xetex

Macros that require the XƎTeX engine

obsolete

Material which is now obsolete, but which needs to remain on the archive for some reason (such as the 1992 LaTeX 2.09 distribution). The tree maintains a “shadow hierarchy” – for example obsolete/macros has the same basic structures macros.

support

TeX support environments and the like

systems

TeX systems; organised by operating environment, but also including:

knuth

Donald Knuth's current distribution.

generic

Complete systems that can potentially operate in more than one operating environment.

MacTeX

The distribution of MacTeX for Mac OS X

TeX Live

The Live collection of freely distributable TeX material, including the TeX Live on-line installer.

MiKTeX

The distribution of MiKTeX; CTAN provides a home for MiKTeX's package repository, part of its online installer.

tds

The TeX Directory Structure standard (the output of the TUG TDS working group)

usergrps

Information supplied by TeX User Groups

web

Literate Programming tools and systems

CTAN on the Web

The home page for CTAN is at https://ctan.org, which provides several features:

• Browsing the CTAN directory
• Browsing in the Catalogue (by package, author, or topic)
• Searching in the Catalogue
• An extensive list of mirrors

Searching CTAN

You can search the content of the Catalogue with the following form on the CTAN site:

In addition, CTAN archives maintain lists of their contents as plain text files, in a number of ways:

1. Sorted by name (This is a big file…around 20M bytes).
2. New or changed in the last 7 days (This is usually a more manageable size…)