la­tex – A TeX macro pack­age that de­fines LaTeX

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 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.