TeX Live
Related articles
TeX Live is an "easy way to get up and running with the TeX document production system. It provides a comprehensive TeX system with binaries for most flavors of Unix, including GNU/Linux, and also Windows. It includes all the major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts that are free software, including support for many languages around the world."
TeX Live is one of the most popular distributions for LaTeX, ConTeXt and friends.
Contents
Installation
The TeX Live packages are arranged into two groups in the official repositories:
- texlive-most includes TeX Live applications.
- texlive-lang provides various character sets and non-English features.
The essential package texlive-core contains the basic texmf-dist tree, while texlive-bin contains the binaries, libraries, and the texmf tree. texlive-core is based on the “medium” install scheme of the upstream distribution. All other packages are based on the eponymous collections in TeX Live. To determine which CTAN packages are included in each package, lookup the files:
/var/lib/texmf/arch/installedpkgs/<package>_<revnr>.pkgs
texlive-most
texlive-lang
- texlive-langchinese
- texlive-langcyrillic
- texlive-langgreek
- texlive-langjapanese
- texlive-langkorean
- texlive-langextra
Manual installation
See the LaTeX Wikibook and TeX Live Guide. For programs that require TeX Live to be installed (e.g. kile) you can use the texlive-dummyAUR package.
Usage
You can test your installation with
$ tex '\empty Hello world!\bye' $ pdftex '\empty Hello world!\bye'
You should get a DVI or a PDF file accordingly.
You will probably want a TeX editor.
There are also a few online solutions that let you create TeX-based documents without TeX Live:
- Authorea — Online collaborative editor for scientific, academic, and technical documents.
- ShareLaTeX — An open source online LaTeX editor. You can either run your own local version where you can host, edit, collaborate in real-time, and compile your LaTeX documents, or simply use the version hosted on the official website.
- Overleaf — (Previously writeLaTeX) Online collaborative LaTeX editor with integrated real-time preview.
- Papeeria — Online LaTeX editor.
- TeXBin — A minimalistic online LaTeX editor.
- cloudTeX — Social TeX in the cloud.
- https://cloud-tex.com/ || [dead link 2016-05-16]
Find more on the LaTeX wikibook.
Important information
- The biber utility used to handle biblatex bibliography is provided as a separate package.
- The way to handle font mappings for updmap was improved in September 2009, and installation should now be much more reliable than in the past. In the meantime, if you encounter error messages about unavailable map files, simply remove them by hand from the
updmap.cfg
file (ideally usingupdmap-sys --edit
). You can also runupdmap-sys --syncwithtrees
to automatically comment out outdated map lines from the config file.
- The ConTeXt formats (for MKII and MKIV) are not automatically generated upon installation. See the ConTeXT wiki for instructions on how to do this.
- The packages containing the documentation and sources are no longer available in official repositories. You can locally build them with tllocalmgr. You can also consult documentation online at https://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/doc.html or on CTAN. Another possibility is using the online documentation at
http://texdoc.net/pkg/packagename
which resolves to the relevant pdf forpackagename
, similar to the command line tooltexdoc
(which is useless without locally installed documentation).
- TeX Live (upstream) now provides a tool for incremental updates of CTAN packages. On that basis, we also plan to update our packages on a regular basis (we have written tools that almost automate that task).
- Some tools and utilities included in TeX Live rely on ghostscript, perl, python2, and ruby.
- For help and information about TeX Live see: https://tug.org/texlive/doc.html and https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html
- System-wide configuration files are under
/usr/share/texmf-config
. User-specific ones should be put under~/.texlive/texmf-config
.$TEXMFHOME
is~/texmf
and$TEXMFVAR
is~/.texlive/texmf-var
.
- A skeleton of a local texmf tree is at
/usr/local/share/texmf
: this directory is writable for members of the group tex.
Paper Size
If you would like to set the default page size to something other than A4 (such as "Letter"), run the following command:
$ texconfig
This command is also capable of changing other useful settings.
Error with "formats not generated" upon update
See this bug report. (Note that if you do not use the experimental engine LuaTeX, you can ignore this.) This situation typically occurs when the configuration files language.def
and/or language.dat
for hyphenation patterns contain references to files from earlier releases of texlive-core
, in particular to the latest experimental hyphenation patterns for German, whose file name changes frequently. Currently they should point to dehyph{n,t}-x-2009-06-19.tex
.
To solve this, you need to either remove these files: /usr/share/texmf-config/tex/generic/config/language.{def,dat}
or update them using the newest version under: /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/language.{def,dat}
and then run
# fmtutil-sys --missing
Fonts
By default, the fonts that come with the various TeX Live packages are not automatically available to Fontconfig. If you want to use them with, say XeTeX or LibreOffice, the easiest approach is to make symlinks as follows:
ln -s /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype/public/<some_fonts_you_want> ~/.fonts/OTF/ (or TTF or Type1)
To make them available to fontconfig, run:
fc-cache ~/.fonts mkfontscale ~/.fonts/OTF (or TTF or Type1) mkfontdir ~/.fonts/OTF (or TTF or Type1)
Alternatively, texlive-core contains the file /etc/fonts/conf.avail/09-texlive-fonts.conf
that contains a list of the font directories used by TeX Live. You can use this file with:
# ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/09-texlive-fonts.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/09-texlive-fonts.conf
And then update fontconfig:
# fc-cache && mkfontscale && mkfontdir
TeXLive Local Manager
The TeXLive Local Manager is a utility provided by Firmicus which allows to conveniently manage a TeX Live installation on Arch Linux. See texlive-localmanager-gitAUR in the AUR.
Usage: tllocalmgr tllocalmgr [options] [command] [args] Running tllocalmgr alone starts the TeXLive local manager shell for Arch Linux. This shell is capable of command-line completion! There you can look at the available updates with the command 'status' and you can install individual CTAN packages using 'install' or 'update' under $TEXMFLOCAL. This is done by creating a package texlive-local-<pkg> and installing it with pacman. Note that this won’t interfere with your standard texlive installation, but files under $TEXMFLOCAL will take precedence. Here are the commands available in the shell: Commands: status -- Current status of TeXLive installation shortinfo * -- Print a one-liner description of CTAN packages info * -- Print info on CTAN packages update * -- Locally update CTAN packages install * -- Locally install new CTAN packages installdoc * -- Locally install documentation of CTAN packages installsrc * -- Locally install sources of CTAN packages listfiles * -- List all files in CTAN packages search * -- Search info on CTAN packages searchfiles * -- Search for files in CTAN packages texhash -- Refresh the TeX file database clean -- Clean local build tree help -- Print helpful information quit -- Quit tllocalmgr The commands followed by * take one of more package names as arguments. Note that these can be completed automatically by pressing TAB. You can also run tllocalmgr as a standard command-line program, with one of the above commands as argument, then the corresponding task will be performed and the program will exit (except when the command is 'status'). tllocalmgr accepts the following options: Options: --help Shows this help --version Show the version number --forceupdate Force updating the TeXLive database --skipupdate Skip updating the TeXLive database --localsearch Search only installed packages --location #TODO? --mirror CTAN mirror to use (default is mirror.ctan.org) --nocolor #TODO
Install .sty files
TeX Live (and teTeX) uses its own directory indexes (files named ls-R
), and you need to refresh them after you copy something into one of the TeX trees. Or TeX can not see them. Magic command:
# mktexlsr
or
# texhash
or
# texconfig[-sys] rehash
A command line program to search through these indexes is
kpsewhich
Hence you can check that TeX can find a particular file by running
kpsewhich <filename.sty>
The output should be the full path to that file.
Alternatively, sty files that are intended only for a particular user should go in the ~/texmf/
tree. For instance, the latex package wrapfig consists of the file wrapfig.sty
and would go in ~/texmf/tex/latex/wrapfig/wrapfig.sty
. There is no need to run mktexlsr
or equivalent because ~/texmf
is searched every time tex is run.
Manual Installation
Normally, new .sty files go in /usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/<package name>/*
. Create this directory if you do not have it. This directory will automatically be searched when *tex is executed. Further discussion can be found here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=85757
Using PKGBUILDs
To install a LaTeX package on a global level, you should use a PKGBUILD for the sake of simplifying maintenance. Examples can be found in the AUR, e.g. texlive-ganttAUR.
Updating babelbib language definitions
If you have the very specific problem of babelbib not having the latest language definitions that you need, and you do not want to recompile everything, you can get them manually from https://www.tug.org/texlive/devsrc/Master/texmf-dist/tex/latex/babelbib/ and put them in /usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/babelbib/
. For example:
# cd /usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/babelbib/ # wget https://www.tug.org/texlive/devsrc/Master/texmf-dist/tex/latex/babelbib/romanian.bdf # wget [...all-other-language-files...] # wget https://www.tug.org/texlive/devsrc/Master/texmf-dist/tex/latex/babelbib/babelbib.sty
Afterwards, you need to run texhash
to update the TeX database:
# texhash