TeX Live - ArchWiki

# TeX Live

Related articles

- TeX Live FAQ
- TeX Live and CJK
- LaTeX

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."

For more information see: Category:TeX

## 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-core texlive-bibtexextra texlive-fontsextra texlive-formatsextra texlive-games | texlive-genericextra texlive-htmlxml texlive-humanities texlive-latexextra texlive-music | texlive-pictures texlive-plainextra texlive-pstricks texlive-publishers texlive-science

### texlive-lang

- texlive-langchinese
- texlive-langcyrillic
- texlive-langgreek
- texlive-langjapanese
- texlive-langkorean
- texlive-langextra

Note: texlive-langextra provides language support for African, Arabic, Armenian, Croatian, Hebrew, Indic, Mongolian, Tibetan and Vietnamese.

### Alternative: TeX Live network install

Installing TeX Live manually honors the Arch Way in that it gives you much more control and lets you understand the process. It is the only way to get a full-featured LaTeX distribution under 100 MB without installing thousands of packages you may never use. For all those programs that require TeX Live to be installed (e.g. kile) you can use the texlive-dummyAUR package from AUR.

A detailed guide for TeX Live network install can be found on the LaTeX Wikibook.

Information about making TeX Live network install: https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-140003

A discussion of the pros and cons of making the TeX Live network install.

## Important information

- 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 using `updmap-sys --edit`). You can also run `updmap-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 for `packagename`, similar to the command line tool `texdoc` (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, 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-bin 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

Note: This may cause conflicts with XeTeX/XeLaTeX if the same fonts are (separately) available to both TeX and Fontconfig, i.e. if multiple copies of the same font are available on the search path.

## 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

### Recent "langukenglish" errors

For problems involving this error when trying to run `tllocalmgr` commands,

    Can't get object for collection-langukenglish at /usr/bin/tllocalmgr line 103

See ary0's solution at the AUR: texlive-localmanagerAUR. In summary, edit `/usr/share/texmf-var/arch/tlpkg/TeXLive/Arch.pm` and remove "langukenglish" from the section of the file shown here:

    my @core_colls =
    qw/ basic context genericrecommended fontsrecommended langczechslovak
    langdutch langfrench langgerman langitalian langpolish langportuguese
    langspanish **langukenglish** latex latexrecommended luatex mathextra metapost
    texinfo xetex /;

## 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>

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

Category:

- TeX