Some years ago, a TUG Technical Council working group defined a common network archive for TeX software, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN). It has become the central repository for TeX-related software on the Internet, and is the source for distributions such as TeX Live and MiKTeX.
CTAN was initiated and continues to be supported by the TeX user groups. Please consider supporting them in turn, by joining TUG (or the TeX user group best for you) or making a donation, which you can specifically target to CTAN projects.
Here are some of the ways to access CTAN:
| USA | from TUG. |
| UK | from UKTUG. |
| Germany | from Dante e.V. |
| Ireland | from Italic; supports explicitly choosing a mirror. |
To receive email about updates to CTAN holdings, subscribe to the ctan-ann@dante.de mailing list. There's also an RSS feed for CTAN. Archives of ctan-ann are available at Gmane and mail-archive.com.
CTAN welcomes contributions of all sorts. Each of the primary servers has an upload page, for instance http://www.ctan.org/upload.html. For more information and links on uploads, please see the FAQ entry on contributing a file to the archives.
A snapshot of the archive is distributed as part of the TeX Collection (on both CD and DVD), approximately yearly by TUG (as a benefit of membership), and many other TeX user groups. You can also purchase the discs without becoming a member.
The backbone machines are the servers at cam.ctan.org (UK), dante.ctan.org (Germany) and tug.ctan.org (USA). Each of these servers also allow access via ftp and rsync. CTAN is mirrored worldwide.
To make most effective use of the mirrors, please consider using the host http://mirror.ctan.org to identify packages on CTAN; for example, http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/. This automatically redirects to some relatively nearby CTAN site, with monitoring information to minimize the chance of redirecting to a site that is down.
This feature was set up by Randy Kobes at the University of Winnipeg, whom we thank profusely. He also set up a similar automated redirection for GNU mirrors, and searching for CPAN packages.