The TeX Live software distribution offers a complete TeX system for a variety of GNU and Unix, Macintosh, Windows and other platforms. It encompasses programs for editing, typesetting, previewing and printing of TeX documents in many different languages, and a large collection of TeX macros and font libraries.
The distribution includes extensive general documentation about TeX, as well as the documentation for the included software packages.
For licensing information, please see the top-level LICENSE.TL and LICENSE.CTAN text files.
We strongly recommend that you read the TeX Live Guide before undertaking the installation. It includes step-by-step instructions, a description of the top-level directories, and more.
If you are installing from the DVD image, the Guide in English and all its translations are in the texlive-doc subdirectory.
After installation, English versions of the Guide are in the texmf-dist/doc/texlive/ hierarchy, in both html and pdf formats. Translations to other languages are also available under texmf-dist/doc/texlive.
We also provide a list of links to the available PDF and HTML documentation for the included packages and programs.
If you are installing from the Internet, the above links won't work. In that case, you can view the TeX Live documentation on the Internet.
For a list of the most important changes in this year's release, see the Release history section at the end of the documentation.
The installation script is named install-tl (install-tl-windows.bat on Windows), and it has two operation modes:
Post-installation package updates and other configurations are performed with the tlmgr (TeX Live Package Manager) program, which likewise has both GUI and text modes.
You can give the command-line option --help to both install-tl and tlmgr for detailed information on both programs. See the documentation links above for (much) more information.
Finally, a few related web pages, for your reference. These are not included in TeX Live: