What is the current state of the art in latex?

Question

TeX and LaTeX really confuse me. I know that there is no official distribution, and that it's a bit like Linux in that there are many packagers and distributions. A lot of the distributions that people suggest to me seem to have lost their maintainers (TeTex for example). There are also different options available within those distributions for converting to pdf and so on.

What is the current consensus, the state of the art, the done thing? Is there a consensus in the first place?

Which distribution should I use (on Mac, via ports if that matters)?

What workflow (commands, tools) should I use to convert latex to pdf?

Thanks.

Answer 1

On Mac, the only distribution that matters is TeX Live, more specifically their Mac version called MacTex.

This distribution is very active and state of the art.

For more questions about the differences and respective advantages of TeX engines and distributions, I suggest asking a question on tex.stackexchange.com.

What workflow (commands, tools) should I use to convert latex to pdf?

In the simplest case, it’s quite enough to invoke the processor (e.g. pdflatex, or better luatex or xelatex) directly. In more sophisticated cases (e.g. you’ve got a bibliography or an index, or are using cross-references), this would require multiple passes, and running other software in between. For these cases, there exist a host of built tools for LaTeX. The simplest is probably just to use latexmk which ships with TeX Live.

Answer 2

I know that there is no official distribution

Most folks would agree that http://www.tug.org/texlive/ is the official distribution.

Which distribution should I use (on Mac, via ports if that matters)?

That one.

What workflow (commands, tools) should I use to convert latex to pdf?

Click on the "typeset" button. Seriously. It's just that complex.