Sigh.
No, they don't have a help number.
TeX was developed a while ago. That is the basic program. But then you want a (slightly more) user friendly thing to be actually dealing with. So nerdy people create more user friendly programs that plug into TeX (like LaTeX or XeTeX or whatever) and you do your typing into that. The whole thing is freeware so nerdy people volounteer their time to create plug ins and to provide support for the plug in's etc etc etc. And then nerdy people created viewers so you could turn your TeX documents into PDF documents or whatever. So there are lots of different versions of lots of different components (and this is to say nothing of the programs that you plug into TeX to get a bibliography / reference list up off the ground).

It is very messy with different distributions that have different directories and different components and different components in different directories etc etc etc.

There are help forums and I've given that a go... Trouble is that either:
1) I don't understand what they are telling me to do (e.g., type xxx) or
2) They don't seem to be able to give me a straight answer as to where in my directory structure I need to put the files. They seem to assume that I'll have a directory that I don't have. Or they assume that I can do the whole installation via Terminal - and I can't. Because I don't have the directory structure such that the Terminal commands can be executed correctly. Also because I don't understand enough about what the Terminal commands are supposed to be doing (and what output in Terminal would signify successful execution) to do this / to figure out precisely what is going wrong.

There just don't seem to be any straight, comprehensible answers.

Different instruction guides tell you different things, too. E.g., do I need to rename my Type1 files using the Berry naming system or is this unnecessary? Some instructions tell you it is necessary. Other instruction manuals tell you this is unnecessary. Still more instruction manuals tell you that you can do either - but you need to change some file or other so that it is consistent with your naming system (the .map file???) That makes sense to me, but, er, which file am I checking to see which naming system is being used in it?????

I could grovel to some people here... Trouble is that apparently 'if you can install MinionPro then you can install ANYTHING'. It is meant to be a 'significant' thing to be doing. And... People here are telling me that that is probably beyond the scope of the TeX support provided by the university.