# LaTeX software for Windows

TeX/LaTeX processors and associated software packages for generating character fonts and viewing output on-screen, and much more, are freely available from the UK TeX Archive. Versions are available for a variety of computer operating systems, including Windows, linux, and MacOS.

miktex-setup.exe (173MB)

• This installs the MikTeX TeX distribution, the TeXnicCenter integrated development environment (IDE), LaTeX documentation, example files, GSView, Ghostscript and configures the software to work together. You can if you prefer download the latest versions of the software from the above sites and carry out the configuration steps yourself.
• The software comes with an un-installer if you should wish to remove it from your pc.
• An easy to configure text file can be edited to tailor it to your system setup. The only assumption if makes is the location for Adobe Reader.

### Font generation

The MiKTeX distribution includes over 1700 character fonts in a variety of sizes. Character dimensions are defined in compact .tfm metric files which the TeX formatter uses to calculate text position on the printed page.

The Yap previewer which displays and prints TeX formatted output uses ".pk" packed bitmap files to render the text. In order to keep the size of the downloaded files to a minimum, the .pk files are calculated when they are first encountered in a document and stored on disk. When you start to use Yap you will experience delays of a few seconds when you see "loading font xxx" messages as each new font file is generated. As time goes by you will accumulate files containing the most commonly used fonts, and font generation delays will occur less frequently.

### Tidying up

After verifying that the TeX software works correctly you can delete setup.exe.

For students and staff of Maths - University of Cambridge, please email problem reports, comments, suggestions to catam@maths.cam.ac.uk.

Chris Mortimer
DAMTP
University of Cambridge

Last updated 16th November 2012