7 History and acknowledgements

This CD-ROM distribution is a joint effort by the TeX Users Group, the UK TeX Users Group, the French TeX Users (GUTenberg), and the German TeX Users (DANTE e.V.), with the support of the Czech/Slovak, Dutch, Indian and Polish user groups. Discussion began in late 1993 when the Dutch TeX Users Group was starting work on its 4AllTeX CD-ROM for MS-DOS users, and it was hoped at that time to issue a single, rational, CD-ROM for all systems. This was far too ambitious a target, but it did spawn not only the very successful 4AllTeX CD-ROM, but also the TUG Technical Council working group on a TeX Directory Structure, which specified how to create consistent and manageable collections of TeX support files. The final draft of the TDS was published in the December 1995 issue of TUGboat, and it was clear from an early stage that one desirable product would be a model structure on CD-ROM. The CD-ROM you now have is a very direct result of the working group’s deliberations. It was also clear that the success of the 4AllTeX CD-ROM showed that Unix users would benefit from a similarly easy system, and this is the other main strand of TeX Live.

We undertook to make a new Unix-based TDS CD-ROM in the autumn of 1995, and quickly identified Thomas Esser’s teTeX as the ideal setup, as it already had multi-platform support and was built with portability across file systems in mind. Thomas agreed to help, and work began seriously at the start of 1996. The first edition was released in May 1996. At the start of 1997, Karl Berry completed a major new release of his Web2c package, which included nearly all the features which Thomas Esser had added in teTeX, and we decided to base the 2nd edition of the CD-ROM on the standard Web2c, with the addition of teTeX’s texconfig script. The 3rd edition of the CD-ROM was based on a major revision of Web2c, 7.2, by Olaf Weber; at the same time, a new revision of teTeX was being made, and TeX Live shares almost all of its features. The 4th edition followed the same pattern, using a new version of teTeX, and a new release of Web2c (7.3).

For the 5th edition (March 2000) many parts of the CD-ROM have been revised and checked, updating hundreds of packages. Omega and pdfTeX are both in new revisions, and portions of the TeX support programs (xdvi, dvips, and tex4ht, for instance) have been revised.

The major change for TeX Live 5 is that all non-free software has been removed. Everything on this CD-ROM should be compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (http://www.debian.org/intro/free); we have done our best to check the license conditions of all packages, but we would very much appreciate hearing of any mistakes.

We are particularly grateful to:

• The German TeX Users (DANTE e.V.), who provided a machine on which the master of the CD-ROM is developed and maintained; and Rainer Schöpf and Reinhard Zierke who look after it;
• The Perforce company, for providing a free copy of their excellent change management system, which we have used to manage the CD-ROM contents;
• Karl Berry, who provided the original Web2c distribution, and has continued to give invaluable advice, encouragement, and help;
• Mimi Burbank, who arranged access at the Florida State University Supercomputer Research Institute to a slew of different computers to compile TeX on, and acted as an essential guinea-pig whenever asked;
• Kaja Christiansen, who provided essential feedback, compilation, and documentation preparation;
• Thomas Esser, without whose marvellous teTeX package this CD-ROM would certainly not exist, and whose continual help makes it a better product;
• Eitan Gurari, whose TeX4ht was used to create the HTML version of this documentation, and who worked tirelessly to improve it at short notice;
• Art Ogawa and Pat Monohon, who coordinated this release for TUG;
• Petr Olsak, who coordinated and checked all the Czech/Slovak material very carefully;
• Fabrice Popineau, who has has worked away unceasingly at the Win32 part of the package (especially the setup!) and contributed in many different ways with ideas, advice and code;
• Staszek Wawrykiewicz, who provided great checking feedback, and co-ordinated the Polish contributions;
• Olaf Weber, for his patient assembly and maintenance of Web2c 7.3;
• Graham Williams, on whose work the catalogue of packages depends.

Alain Rabaute, Pascal Quignon, Gerhard Wilhelms, Fabrice Popineau, Janka Chlebíková, Staszek Wawrykiewicz, Erik Frambach, and Ulrik Vieth kindly translated documentation into their respective languages, checked other documentation, and provided very welcome feedback.