MacTeX is a free redistribution of TeX Live, a typesetting environment based on TeX. While TeX Live is designed to be cross-platform (running on Unix, macOS, and Windows), MacTeX includes Mac-specific utilities and front-ends (such as TeXShop and BibDesk).^[1] It is also pre-configured to work out-of-the-box with macOS, as it provides sensible defaults for configuration options that, in TeX Live, are left up to the user to allow for its cross-platform compatibility.

Details

MacTeX is packaged and distributed by the MacTeX TeXnical working group, a subgroup of TeX Users Group (TUG). TeX Live is distributed by the TUG, making MacTeX less a fork of TeX Live than a customised repackaging.

The full MacTeX install package contains three subpackages:^[1]

• TeX Live
• GUI applications
  • BibDesk
  • LaTeXiT (a LaTeX equation editor)
  • TeX Live Utility (a utility to update, install or remove parts of TeX Live)
  • TeXShop (a Mac-based TeX editor)
• Ghostscript (an open source version of PostScript)

A substantially smaller version of MacTeX, BasicTeX, which does not contain Ghostscript or the aforementioned GUI programs, can be used instead along with a TeX editor as well.^[2]