Installation – Getting Started with LaTeX – Research Guides at New York University

For Mac OS X it is strongly recommended that you use MacTex.  Information about MacTex can be found on their main page. It is recommended that you click the link “download MacTex”.  This link will take you to a page with the download package, as well as, the instructions for downloading MacTex.  If you are having trouble locating you can download package.  Follow the instruction on that page or the simple instructions listed below:

1.  Click on “MacTex.pkg” near the top of the page to begin the download.
2.  One the download is complete open the package and following along the installation wizard.
3.  The “MacTex.pkg” contains several different programs and documents.  If you did not change the path during installation these items should appear in a folder with the following location Application/TeX.
4. The two most important items contained in the TeX folder are TeX Live Utility a program that you can use to update MacTex, and TeXShop a front end text editor.  It is recommended that your run Tex Live Utility before getting started to check for updates.

With everything installed and up to date you may want to play around and try typesetting your own document, to do this open TeXShop.  For your first document you should go to the Getting Started: Creating a document tab.  Once you have gone through that if you are looking for some additional ideas or exercises go to the Exercises tab.  

When starting a new document in TeXShop you may want to begin by going to File > New from Stationary > AMS-Article this will open a text editor with a standard template for creating an article.  You will see other templates in New from Stationary that you may want to use in the future, such as beamer for creating slide show.