Siam

I'm a process controls engineer/data scientist. I am passionate about automation and a serial tinkerer with "humble" homelab.

TeX Installation Notes

09 Jun 2019 »

This post outlines the steps I took to install TeX Live 2019 on my Arch-based PC. For my TeX editor, I use Visual Studio Code. My configuration for Visual Studio code will be covered in a later post.

Preliminary Steps

Install perl, tk, and perl-tk packages in Arch. The perl-tk package is needed for the GUI-based installation.

sudo pacman -S perl tk perl-tk

TeX Live 2019 Installation Steps

  1. Create directory for holding installation files:

     mkdir texlive-2019
 cd texlive-2019/
 wget http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz
 tar -xzvf install-tl-unx.tar.gz
 cd install-tl-20190608/

  2. Start the installer. The install options and collections.

     sudo ./install-tl -gui

  3. After installation, add the right paths (ensure these paths exist) to your PATH, MANPATH, and INFOPATH.

     export PATH="/usr/local/texlive/2019/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH"
 export MANPATH="/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/doc/man:$MANPATH"
 export INFOPATH="/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/doc/info:$INFOPATH"

  4. The tlmgr GUI can be started with:

     sudo tlmgr -gui

TEXMFHOME

TeX programs will search through subdirectories in the TEXMFHOME directory during compilation. Check the location of theTEXMFHOME directory:

kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFHOME

Subdirectories in TEXMFHOME must follow the same subdirectory structure as seen in other TEXMF directories. A sample subdirectory structure can be seen by listing the contents of the TEXMFLOCAL directory (found via kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFLOCAL) :

ls /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local

To use *.tex, *.sty files and local packages from TEXMFHOME, create a tex/latex subfolder in TEXMFHOME. You can create separate directories to organize your files here as well.

mkdir -p /home/siam/texmf/tex/latex

To use custom BibTex style files (*.bst), create a bibtex/bst subfolder.

mkdir -p /home/siam/texmf/bibtex/bst/

Recent TeX Live distributions no longer require you to run texhash or mktexlsr after adding and/or modifying files in TEXMFHOME. In the past, a database (flat text file) of TEXMFHOME files, named ls-R, in TEXMFHOME would be updated will a listing of all files in TEXMFHOME.

To verify if a file is being correct read from TEXMFHOME, you can use:

kpsewhich filename.sty