[texhax] installing new styles with tetex on Linux

[Steve Schwartz]

> MikTeX on my Windows machine has a very nice easy way to install new 
> styles and packages.  Tetex on my new Linux machine seems not to have an 
> equivalent easy GUI for package management.  How does one install new 
> styles under tetex in Linux?  I'm looking to install the MLA style of 
> bibligraphies.  I found the link on CTAN.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I use TEX's environment variables which
I set. e.g., in my .cshrc to do this. This leaves my main tex
distribution intact (so that when I upgrade it I don't need to go in and
fiddle, nor run any separate texconfig things, etc.) There's a big list
set out in section 4.1 of the Kpathsea documentation, and a brief
discussion in several FAQs. I found one at
http://www.ai.mit.edu/lab/sysadmin/latex/faq/ which is clear, but the
TeXFaqs searched with TEXINPUTS will also work. In particular, try
setting 

TEXINPUTS
BIBINPUTS
BSTINPUTS

to point to your private style files, etc. Paths are colon separated,
with a trailing colon pulling in (la)tex's defaults. A path ending in a
double slash is supposed to be recursive down the directory.

E.g.:

setenv TEXINPUTS .:/home/mylatex//:

Of course, this is all private to the user and installations where
multiple users share a single tex distribution may prefer to do it
centrally (or to pass around bits of .cshrc or .profile files).

Steve

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| Steve Schwartz               S.J.Schwartz at qmul.ac.uk            |
| Astronomy Unit                                                  |
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