LaTeX is a widely-used macro package for TeX, providing many basic document formating commands extended by a wide range of packages. It is a development of Leslie Lamport's original LaTeX 2.09, and superseded the older system in June 1994. The basic distribution is catalogued separately, at latex-base; apart from a large set of contributed packages and third-party documentation (elsewhere on the archive), the distribution includes:

• a bunch of required packages, which LaTeX authors are “entitled to assume” will be present on any system running LaTeX; and
• a minimal set of documentation detailing differences from the ‘old’ version of LaTeX in the areas of user commands, font selection and control, class and package writing, font encodings, configuration options and modification of LaTeX.

For downloading details, see the linked catalogue entries above.