TUGboat, TeX Live, and the annual conference

TUG's public-facing work comes in three parts: a journal, a software distribution, and a conference. None of them require membership to use, but membership is what pays for them.

TUGboat, the journal

TUGboat: The Communications of the TeX Users Group has run since TUG's founding and now publishes three issues a year — tutorials, technical articles, conference proceedings, and community news. Members get the current issue as it's published, both in print and, for the technical articles, online; older issues become freely available to everyone after a delay. Anyone can propose an article — there's a public style guide, a submission deadline for each issue, and an editorial ethics statement covering how submissions are handled.

Full archives, indexed by title, author, and topic, live at tug.org/TUGboat.

TeX Live, the software

TeX Live is the free, cross-platform distribution most people actually install to get a working TeX and LaTeX system — binaries and packages for Linux, Windows, and (as MacTeX) macOS, maintained jointly by TUG and TeX user groups worldwide. It's free regardless of TUG membership; most major Linux distributions package it directly, and it ships a new release each year.

Download and install instructions for every platform are at tug.org/texlive.

The annual conference

TUG holds an annual conference, often jointly with a regional user group such as EuroTeX, bringing people together across the full range of experience — from a first LaTeX document to font engineering. Talks and proceedings are published afterwards through TUGboat. Announcements go out on the public tex-meetings mailing list, which anyone can join or browse without being a member, and TUG welcomes proposals from groups anywhere in the world willing to host a future meeting.