[OS X TeX] Installing packages

[William F. Adams]

On Thursday, June 3, 2004, at 01:46  PM, Joseph C. Slater wrote:

> Ahhh, this is IMHO a great feature of MikTeX that we are missing on 
> the Mac side. You are very spoiled by it. There is no such package 
> manager on the Mac.

At one time, there were .pkg files for TeX on NeXTstep which were 
installed by NeXT's installer program. Gerben's iInstaller is way, way 
cool though, and far more efficient with lots more options.

> Packages should be put in the directory:
> ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex (home directory/Library...)
>
> You can (and should) put them in separate folders for easier tracking.
>
> You will have to execute latex  packagename.ins file for many of them 
> (latexing them in TeXShop or iTeXMac will do this, but command line is 
> often faster when you become used to it.) when needed (if there is 
> one). You end up having to manually go to ctan.org and search on the 
> style files you need, download the package, expand it, move it to the 
> right place, install it .

It really should be possible to create a iInstaller package for a given 
LaTeX package, but if you find one w/ a Unix ``make'' file, and have 
the developer tools installed, you can just run that.

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

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