Comprehensive TeX Archive Network

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Comprehensive TeX Archive Network ( CTAN ) is a very extensive worldwide archive of FTP servers with software and documentation relating to the TeX typesetting system , which is operated by the TeX user associations. The servers are mirrored with each other on a daily basis.

history

Before CTAN was founded, there were a number of individuals who publicly distributed TeX over the Internet, but there was no systematic collection of the software. Anyone looking for a package for a specific purpose had to search mailing lists and newsgroups to find references to sources of files for the files that were needed for their purposes in the discussions that took place there. During a panel discussion that Joachim Schrod organized at the EuroTeX conference in 1991, the idea of ​​bringing these individual collections together came up. (Joachim Schrod was interested in the topic because he has been active in the TeX community since 1982 and was running one of the largest FTP servers in Germany at the time.)

CTAN was founded in 1992 and was set up by Rainer Schöpf and Joachim Schrod in Germany, Sebastian Rahtz in Great Britain and George Greenwade in the USA. The name CTAN comes from Greenwade.

At the beginning of 1993, the servers were synchronized with each other for the first time. The TeX Users Group provided the framework, a "technical working group", to organize this work. The founding of CTAN was officially announced at the EuroTeX conference in Aston in 1993.

The English website was always placed in the same place in Cambridge from the start, while the American server moved twice and the German server moved four times.

The location of CTAN USA under George Greenwade was initially Sam Houston State University . In 1995 the server was moved to the University of Massachusetts in Boston , where Karl Berry continued to operate it. In 1999 he moved to Saint Michael's College in Colchester (Vermont) . The server was in operation until the end of January 2011. The domain tug.ctan.org has been breaking up on a server at the University of Utah since January 2013 thanks to the help of Nelson Beebe .

The first German CTAN server was at Heidelberg University and was operated by Rainer Schöpf. It was transferred to the University of Mainz in 1999. When the next move to the University of Hamburg , administration changed to Reinhard Zierke. The German CTAN node has been operated by a commercial hoster since 2005 because the data traffic had become so extensive in the meantime that no university was able to support the server. The German CTAN server is run by DANTE eV

After the British node was abandoned under the direction of Robin Fairbairns at Cambridge University and after Jim Hefferon left the team in January 2011, the CTAN main node is administered by eight volunteers: Erik Braun, Ina Dau, Robin Fairbairns, Manfred Lotz, Gerd Neugebauer, Petra Rübe-Pugliese, Rainer Schöpf and Joachim Schrod. The CTAN portal, which Jim Hefferon maintained on the basis of the data in the TeX Catalog by Graham Williams, was redesigned in December 2012. Language support for German-speaking users has also been available since 2014.

The data traffic on the main nodes of CTAN - without the 75 mirror servers - amounted to six terabytes of downloads per month in May 2009 .

On January 6, 2016, CTAN released 5025 packages from 2318 authors.

services

CTAN provides the following services:

  • In the upload service , new software packages that are uploaded to CTAN by developers are checked and installed. If necessary, individual questions should be clarified with the developers. This activity prepares the creation of the TeX distribution TeX Live , since only those packages are included in the distribution that are also available on CTAN.
  • The CTAN mirror master is used to update the data that is held on the CTAN mirror servers.
  • The entries in the TeX Catalog must be maintained. They have been significantly expanded by the CTAN team (mostly by Robin Fairbairns) over several years and must be updated on an ongoing basis. New entries must be created for newly added packages.
  • The CTAN website offers access to the inventory of CTAN as well as to the metadata for the individual software packages via a graphical user interface. It was extensively revised in 2012/2013.
  • Updates on CTAN will be announced via a mailing list . The list can also be read via an RSS feed.
  • There is an internal SVN repository for developers .

Installation of packages

For the installation, CTAN has several packages in ZIP format in the / install directory , which adhere to the format of the TeX Directory Structure (TDS), so that all files are automatically saved to the root directory of the texmf tree of the local TeX installation when they are unpacked in the right place. These packages have the file extension tds.zip . In addition, modern TeX distributions - TeX Live , MiKTeX - have their own package managers that import their own updates, which are also distributed on CTAN. In addition, the packets are available on CTAN in a structure that the user can browse with his own FTP client or with the web browser. The web interface and the TeX catalog are available for targeted searches, where the packages are also listed according to their purpose.

The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network is - despite its name - not an archive for older versions of packages or programs; After they have been replaced by a more recent version on CTAN, these can only be found on the server prints, which are produced annually on DVD-ROM by the TeX user associations (in German-speaking countries: DANTE ) under the name TeX Collection . They are distributed to the members of the development associations within the framework of membership and sold through bookshops. A daily online archive of older versions of CTAN has existed for some time as a private project, but it is still in the beta phase .

A role model for other networks

Based on CTAN, there is a corresponding online archive called CPAN for the Perl programming language . There are also variants for the Erlang programming language (the CEAN) and a general collection of knowledge in the form of the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN), operated by the Open Knowledge Foundation . Comparable repositories for the S programming language are CRAN for R and CSAN for S-PLUS .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c CTAN team: CTAN and the TeX Directory Structure . In: CTAN-ann mailing list. May 28, 2012. Retrieved May 28, 2012.
  2. ↑ a b Jim Hefferon. tug.ctan.org offline . Posting. comp.text.tex, January 30, 2011. Retrieved February 19, 2011.
  3. ↑ Steve Peter: January 2013 TUG news: election, ctan, meetings, tugboat, comic . Posting. TeXhax mailing list. January 20, 2013. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
  4. ↑ a b Rainer Schöpf, Joachim Schrod: CTAN in the 1st quarter of 2011 . In: DTK 2/2011. Pp. 21-24.
  5. ↑ CTAN: CTAN-upload-addendum . Retrieved January 6, 2016.
  6. ↑ CTAN team: The new www.ctan.org . Posting. CTAN announcements. December 12, 2012. Retrieved January 20, 2012.
  7. ↑ a b Gerd Neugebauer: CTAN: Relaunch of the Web portal . In: TUGboat, Volume 34 (2013), No. 1, pp. 6-9.
  8. ↑ Gerd Neugebauer: CTAN speaks German: language support for the web portal . In: Die TeXnische Komödie, issue 4/2014, pp. 67–72.
  9. ↑ George Grätzer: What is new in LaTeX? II. TeX implementations, evolution or revolution (PDF; 62 kB) . In: Notices of the AMS. May 2009. pp. 627-629, 628.
  10. ↑ CTAN - Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. January 6, 2016, accessed January 6, 2016 .
  11. ^ TeX Users Group: TeX Directory Structure . In: tug.org. February 20, 2004. Retrieved May 28, 2012.
  12. ↑ CTAN Team: Guidelines for uploading TDS-Packaged materials to CTAN . In: www.ctan.org. Retrieved November 8, 2014.
  13. ↑ The TeX Catalog Online ( Memento of the original from December 9, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / dante.ctan.org
  14. ↑ CTAN-Mirror (Beta)  ( page can no longer be accessed , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (+ history). Retrieved November 8, 2014.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / ctanmirror.speedata.de