The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network is the authoritative place to find TeX-related material that is available for you to download.
There are many sites around the world that make the holdings available and you automatically get your material from one near you.
CTAN is a set of sites that work together to serve the TeX community.
Two sites form the core from which the material propagates. They accept uploads of new or updated packages and ensure that all sites hold the same material.
www.dante.de
is in Germany, is sponsored by the German TeX group
Dante,
and is managed by
Rainer Schöpf.
www.tex.ac.uk
is in England, is sponsored by the
UK TeX Users Group,
and is managed by Robin Fairbairns.
The other sites around the world lend a hand by automatically 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; we are always grateful for volunteers who can help out in this way.
If you are linking to something on CTAN then please
use an address like
http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib
rather than using a specific site like dante.ctan.org.
The mirror.ctan.org link will redirect users to a mirror
near them, saving them download time and saving the core sites
network traffic.
Before CTAN there were a number of people who made 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.)
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.
In 1999 the American site moved to
Saint Michael's College in
Vermont,
with the tug.ctan.org
address (it is no longer an active site).
Because of these moves the American site's web address has changed
twice — if you see a CTAN address as
shsu.edu or cs.umb.edu then please wipe it out.
Note: the well-known Perl archive CPAN was based on the CTAN model.
You can monitor the latest contributions from the community on the
CTAN announcements list.
These announcements also appear on
comp.text.tex
so you can simply read that group instead.
Do not send questions about TeX to CTAN. Instead, see these TeX resources.
Send any questions or comments about CTAN
to ctan at dante.de.
This site is a web interface to the CTAN archive.
I hope you find it useful.
Questions or comments about this web interface go to
Jim Hefferon, ftpmaint at the site alan.smvt.edu.