There seem to be a lot of different TeX-related ports, and much of the info I find is fairly old, referring to packages like TeTeX which I think are out of date. Is there an up-to-date guide for using TeX on FreeBSD, something to get a person started with the right ports? Ideally, ports that would handle Unicode characters, by the way. Thanks.
Thanks to the heroic porting effort of Hirocki Sato who was porting TeXLive from 2001 until 2014 FreeBSD was stuck with teTeX distribution which was obsoleted in may of 2006 until fairly recently. That was one of the reason that I dropped FreeBSD in early 2007.
Going back to your question you should use TeXLive-full if you need complete TeX. Now for non-English Unicode support you should be using
LuaTeX or
XeTeX engine instead of default
pdfTeX or Don's Knuth original TeX engine. The difference between the different TeX engines as well as different set of Macros (LaTeX vs obsolete AMSTeX) vs key value driven
ConTeXt is beyond the scope of my answer. Based on your question you know little about TeX and friends. I would suggest that you direct your further questions to our wonderful TeX community.
http://tex.stackexchange.com/
For the record I would advise you to use LuaTeX engine for Unicode support unless you have a very specific requirements (Vietnamese or few other South Asian languages where you could benefit form XeTeX). If you are on that level you will know which engine to use anyway.
By the way if you decide to use
ConTeXt instead of widely used TeX (LaTeX macros) notice that TeXLive usually contain obsolete version of ConTeXt. FreeBSD IIRC doesn't have a separate port of ConTeXt. I strongly discourage you from using ConTeXt if you are going to be using TeX for scientific work. I strongly encourage you to use ConTeXt if you are going to be writing a novel or design very special document (for example trying to reproduce a book which looks like it was handwritten in 12 century).
Finally to complete this short post. There is a very interesting
kerTeX minimal distribution which drops all that TeXLive kitchen sink GNU crap and resurrects Don's Knuth engine, his Matafont, MetaPost, and
Leslie Lamport LaTeX macros. That distribution should be actually default minimal system distribution of TeX. More recently people significantly experimented with begin able to use natively programming languages other then Lua from TeX itself. I really like
PythonTeX which is unfortunately not ported to FreeBSD.
