TeX Live Utility
TeX Live Utility is a Mac OS X graphical interface for TeX Live Manager. It aims to provide a native Mac OS X interface for the most commonly used functions of the TeX Live Manager command-line tool.
TeX Live 2008 and later come with the TeX Live Manager for updating, installing, and otherwise managing a TeX installation. It includes a cross-platform Perl/Tk graphical interface, and a command-line interface (tlmgr). The cross-platform Perl/Tk interface is less Mac-like, but provides access to more features.
Functionality
The present subset of commands is as follows:
- Set paper size for all TeX programs
- Update packages (all or subset)
- Install and remove packages (all or subset)
- Show details for individual packages (including texdoc results)
- Set a mirror URL for command-line tlmgr usage
See GettingStarted for screenshots and more specific details.
Why Use This?
Why use this program when you can use the command line tlmgr or the Perl/Tk GUI? TeX Live Utility performs TeX Live infrastructure updates using the Disaster Recovery script, which avoids problems with tlmgr removing itself while updating. TeX Live Utility also provides a native OS X user interface. Beyond that, there's no compelling reason to switch from the command line or X11 GUI if you're comfortable with them.
Requirements
- Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.7 or greater
- All versions of TeX Live Utility are compatible with Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) in spite of misinformation to the contrary
- TeX Live 2008 installed via MacTeX or the standard Unix install
- TeX Live Utility 0.80 and later will only work with TeX Live 2009
Versioning Notes
TeX Live Utility 0.74 and earlier will work with TeX Live 2008 or 2009, but TeX Live 2008 will never be updated again, so functionality is limited to searching/deleting/info on packages. In addition, once TeX Live 2009 is released, TeX Live 2008 content will be removed from the CTAN servers.
