There are many ways to get LaTeX on an OS X box. I prefer to manage my software via fink, and even then there are a lot of choices. At the time of this writing (2010-08-28) I have the following options:
- texlive (0.20080816-3)
- xetex (0.996-1001)
- tetex (3.0-1006)
- extex (0.0svn8062-1)
- ptex (3.1.11-3)
And I might have missed some. Which of these works best? Which is most up-to-date? Why are there so many?
Best Answer
I'd simply go to http://www.tug.org/mactex/ and download one zip file and that's everything that you'll need. It includes a complete TeX Live distribution, and also some very useful Mac-specific GUI tools like LaTeXiT.
Fink, MacPorts, etc. may be useful for many things, but getting a complete up-to-date TeX distribution isn't one of those cases. See also this closely related question.