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Repositories of TeX material

To aid the archiving and retrieval of of TeX-related files, a TUG working group developed the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN). Each CTAN site has identical material, and maintains authoritative versions of its material. These collections are extensive; in particular, almost everything mentioned in this FAQ is archived at the CTAN sites (see the lists of software at the end of each answer).

The CTAN sites are Dante (Germany), Cambridge (UK) and TUG (USA); the links are to the root of the CTAN tree, above which the layout is identical at each site.

The TeX files at each CTAN node may also be accessed via the Web at URLs http://www.dante.de/tex-archive, http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive and http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive respectively, but not all CTAN mirrors are Web-accessible.

As a matter of course, to reduce network load, please use the CTAN site or mirror closest to you. A complete and current list of CTAN sites and known mirrors is available as file CTAN.sites on the archives themselves.

Better still, the script behind http://mirror.ctan.org/ will cunningly choose a “nearby” mirror for you, using information from the database ‘behind’ CTAN.sites; at present it uses ftp protocol for transfers, but the intention is to convert it to using http (web) protocol in the near future.

To access a particular thing through the mirror.ctan.org mechanism, simply place the CTAN path after the base URL; so http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/footmisc/ will connect you to the footmisc directory at some CTAN site (or a mirror) — note that the tex-archive part of the CTAN path isn’t needed.

For details of how to find files at CTAN sites, see “finding (La)TeX files”.

The TeX user who has no access to any sort of network may buy a copy of the archive as part of the TeX Live distribution.