What is CTAN?

The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network is the authoritative place to find TeX-related material for download.

Structure

CTAN is a set of sites that work together to serve the TeX community.

Three of the sites form the core. These actively manage the material, for instance, by accepting uploads of new or updated packages. They work closely together to ensure that they hold the same material and maintain the same policies.

In addition, other sites around the world help out by mirroring the contents of the archive from a core site, and then in turn making their copies available to the public. This gives users close to their location better access, and relieves the core sites of network load. We maintain a list of official mirrors; please use one if you can.

History

Before CTAN there were a number of people who made some TeX materials available for public download but there was no systemmatic collection. At a podium discussion that Joachim Schrod organized at the 1991 EuroTeX conference the idea arose to bring together the separate collections. (Joachim was involved because he ran one of the largest ftp servers in Germany at this time and had heavily modified the basic tool mirror.pl for this purpose.)

CTAN was built in 1992, by Rainer Schöpf and Joachim Schrod in Germany, Sebastian Rahtz in the UK, and George Greenwade in the US (George came up with the name). The site structure was put together at the start of 1992 — Sebastian did the main work — and synchronized at the start of 1993. The TeX Users Group provided a framework, a Technical Working Group, for this task's organization. CTAN was officially announced at the EuroTeX conference in Aston, 1993.

All three core sites have moved around geographically. But the German and English sites have been a bit more stable; in particular they have kept the same web address. The American site started out at Sam Houston State University under George Greenwade, in 1995 it moved to UMass Boston where it was run by Karl Berry. Because of these moves its web address has change twice — if you see a CTAN address as either shsu.edu or cs.umb.edu please wipe it out. In 1999 the American site moved to its present home at Saint Michael's College in Vermont with the tug.ctan.org address.

Note: the well-known Perl archive CPAN is based on the CTAN model.

Interested in being a mirror?

That'd be a help. Mirror traffic is light, with perhaps one visitor is logged in at any time. (However, with a fair number of mirrors, the mirrors together reduce the load on the core servers, thereby providing all of our community with better systems.)

You will need about 10 Gb of hard disk space and an always-on Internet connection. For the setup details, see our mirroring page. Once you are ready, visit our signup page. Thank you!

Contacting us

Direct any questions or comments about the administration of CTAN to the ctan (at) dante.de email list. Do not send questions about TeX to this list. Instead see the TeX resources list.