Notice that nothing is shown while typing it, but it is registered nonetheless. You might be asked to provide the administrator password of your Mac. The sudo command is used to run the update as an administrator, which is necessary because MacTeX installs as root, and the tlmgr command calls the package manager. To check whether LaTeX was installed correctly, open the Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and run: This distribution contains everything you need to start typesetting beautiful documents. How to install and use LaTeX 1.1 Set upĭownload and install the latest MacTeX distribution. Update 2: Overleaf offers a service similar to that of ShareLaTeX.ġ. It even allows you to knit some R into your documents. It’s free (up to a certain extent), and enables you to work from anywhere, explore your document history, collaborate with ease, sync to Dropbox/GitHub, and use tons of templates. Update: ShareLaTeX has evolved into a very accessible yet powerful online editor.

This quick guide to LaTeX on a Mac is targeted at first time users and is meant as an aid to minimize the amount of effort it takes to prepare your system, and to maximize the time you can use to (learn to) write beautiful documents and conduct reproducible research. To my best knowledge, a guide for quickly preparing your system for the use of LaTeX and some of its important extensions is currently not available. Unfortunately, making sure you can work with LaTeX and exploit its full potential can be quite cumbersome. LaTeX is a very powerful language for writing documents.

Get latex for mac