One of the problems I had to fight for a long time when using TeX over the years was that I often found a snippet on the net that was supposed to do exactly what I’ve been looking for, but when I then tried to use it at least one .sty or some other kind of package was missing and it was once again Google-time. When I switched to the fruity side of computing MacPorts installed TeXLive for me. TeXLive is a TeX distribution by the TUG, the TeX User Groups, that’s at least according to the German news-site heise.de the biggest TeX distribution out there.

So 2 days ago the TUG released this year’s edition of the distribution that comes with tons of new stuff, most notably a package manager ( tlmgr ) that lets you easily add, remove and update TeX packages. People using MiKTeX should know this whole idea of actually managing TeX packages ;-) For a complete listing of additions, checkout the relevant page in the docs.

And perhaps, while working on my master thesis, I can finally dig a little deeper into TeX without having to google for packages every couple of seconds thanks to TeXLive :-)