Adding latex packages

By ontu at Wed, Oct 1 2008 4:03pm |

Hello everyone. I have already installed mactex from this page:

http://www.tug.org/mactex/

and it seems to work fine.

What I would like to do now is to add some new packages not included by default in my instalation. The question is: is there some package manager, or something like that, which help me to install things? Or should I just install every new package by hand and updating database? And by the way... how?

Thanks.

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Thu, 2008-10-02 13:03 — Hooman

Adding new packages in LaTeX

If you have installed TeXlive 2008, there is a command line utility called tlmgr which can be used to add and remove packages. There is a gui option that invokes a window where you can see installed packages and add or remove them.

Make sure that X11 is running and then in a terminal window type: tlmgr -gui

Also there is a complete guide on using tlmgr in the TeXlive 2008 documentation.

Good luck.
Hooman

Thu, 2008-10-02 14:37 — patter

TeXLive Package Manager

Thanks for the tip, I never realized this package manager was present at all. Be careful if you go modifying packages, as the path search order that LaTeX uses isn't always obvious.

Fri, 2008-10-03 02:03 — ontu

Mactex = TexLive???

I have installed Mactex. Is the same LaTeX distribution than Texlive? It seems that, because in the Texlive page, you can read:

"...for MacOSX, see the MacTeX distribution"

But I have not the tlmgr command :(.

Fri, 2008-10-03 07:26 — mmurray

Mostly you can just download

Mostly you can just download the package and put it into

~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/misc

where you should create the folders if you don't have them. Probably I have too many nested folders here.

For example if it was the geometry package you would download geometry.zip, unpack it (double click on it) and then put the geometry directory into the misc folder above. It should contain

ChangeLog README geometry.ins sample.tex
Makefile geometry.dtx manual.pdf test

Now open terminal and cd into the geometry folder. Type `make' and everything shoudl be unpacked to get

ChangeLog geometry.cfg geometry.ins manual.drv test
Makefile geometry.drv geometry.log manual.pdf
README geometry.dtx geometry.sty sample.tex

You can usually get the same effect if there is no Makefile by latexing geometry.ins and geometry.dtx. I think you can then trash geometry.ins, geometry.dtx and geometry.log

Michael

Fri, 2008-10-03 11:00 — Hooman

The latest versions of

The latest versions of MacTeX are TeXLive. If you have downloaded it recently, it is TeXLive 2008.