What it is
TeX Live is a complete distribution of TeX and LaTeX, the typesetting system used for academic papers, theses, books and anything heavy on mathematics. You write a plain-text .tex file with markup for structure and formulas, and LaTeX lays it out as a typeset PDF. TeX Live bundles the engines (pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX, LuaLaTeX), common packages and fonts.
pdflatex paper.tex
Why it’s here
- Typesetting that looks right. Equations, references and page layout come out to publication standard.
- Pandoc’s PDF engine. Pandoc uses LaTeX to turn Markdown and other formats into PDFs.
On CoreDesktop
CoreDesktop installs the texlive package group from pacman, which brings in the main TeX Live packages. Run pdflatex, xelatex or lualatex in a terminal. update keeps it current with the rest of the pacman packages.