This chapter includes texlive applications that create output equivalent to typesetting.
There are two alternative routes through this chapter:
Some people may wish to use the binary installer, either because of the complexity of installing all of texlive from source, or because they only want a part of the package, or perhaps because they wish to get updates as soon as those are available (the source is only updated annually). These people should follow the install-tl-unx instructions,. After installing, they can run tlmgr to update their system.
Most people reading BLFS will wish to build from source. BLFS used to start by installing install-tl-unx and then use that to bootstrap the build. Nowadays, we build almost the whole of texlive without a binary install, by adding the separately-packaged texmf files into this build. For this, begin at texlive-20140525 which will install most of texlive, together with all of the supporting files. This almost-complete install can then be used to build the remaining parts of texlive, asymptote-2.32, xindy-2.5.1 and biber-1.9.
Because the texmf files (including documentation, fonts, scripts and supporting files) are all in one tarball, it is not practical to limit what gets extracted in a sensible way (e.g. to exclude one or other of the typesetting engines) when building from source in this manner.
In either case, BLFS installs into /opt/texlive/2014 with the sole exception of two
libraries from the source install which are installed into
/usr/lib for convenience.