What is the difference between Tex Live and TexMaker. Are they in the same category? What's the difference between these two?
1 Answer
When you use LaTeX, the documents are compiled to PDF with command-line tools such as latex
, pdflatex
, xelatex
. These have to be invoked from the command line: cmd.exe
on Windows and usually bash
in Linux. LaTeX itself has no graphical user interface.
TeX Live is a comprehensive collection of these command line programs, with all the packages, configuration files, fonts etc. that they use. So you need to install TeX Live to write documents in LaTeX.
If you want to edit your documents with syntax coloration, and compile them to PDF with a single button, you need a LaTeX editor. Editors hide away the command line stuff between a graphical user interface. I think TeXLive includes the TeXWorks editor. TeXMaker is another editor that you can use.
TeXMaker
is an editor with special support forLaTeX
, but you can't use it standalone. It needs a so calledTeX
distribution likeTeXLive
, which provides the binaries likepdflatex
and the packages!