Copyright (C) 1994, 95, 96 by the TeX Users Group.
Permission to use, copy, and distribute this document for any purpose without modification and without fee is hereby granted, provided that this notice appears in all copies. It is provided "as is" without expressed or implied warranty.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this document under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the modifications are clearly marked and the document is not represented as the official one.
This document is available on any CTAN host (Appendix section Related references has a complete reference). Please send questions or suggestions by email to @email{twg-tds@mail.tug.org} or by postal mail to Karl Berry / 135 Center Hill Road / Plymouth, MA 02360 / USA. We welcome all comments.
TeX is a powerful, flexible typesetting system used by thousands of people around the world. It is extremely portable and runs on virtually all operating systems. One unfortunate side effect of TeX's flexibility, however, is that there has been no single "right" way to install it. This has resulted in many sites having different installed arrangements.
The primary purpose of this document is to describe a standard TeX Directory Structure (TDS): a directory hierarchy for macros, fonts, and the other implementation-independent TeX system files. As a matter of practicality, this document also suggests ways to incorporate the rest of the TeX files into a single structure. The TDS has been designed to work on all modern systems. In particular, the Technical Working Group (TWG) believes it is usable under MacOS, MS-DOS, OS/2, Unix, VMS, and Windows NT. We hope that administrators and developers of both free and commercial TeX implementations will adopt this standard.
This document is intended both for the TeX system administrator at a site and for people preparing TeX distributions--everything from a complete runnable system to a single macro or style file. It may also help TeX users find their way around systems organized this way. It is not a tutorial: we necessarily assume knowledge of the many parts of a working TeX system. If you are unfamiliar with any of the programs or file formats we refer to, consult the references in Appendix section Related references.
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