[OS X TeX] Upgrading to 2008

[Herbert Schulz]

On Dec 8, 2008, at 2:48 AM, soumya dipta wrote:

>
>
> Hello everyone,
> I have a 2007 Tex distribution installed(and working) I am looking  
> forward to upgrade to 2008 version.
> Is there a way of upgrading my version to the latest one without  
> installing the whole distribution?
>
> Thanks
> shom


Howdy,

You can download a very small distribution called BasicTeX (about  
50MB, vs about 1.2GB for MacTeX) from <http://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html 
 >. Whether this will do the job for you really depends upon your  
needs. We have had a couple of folks who ended up need ing to do some  
font installation to use what they needed.

All in all I think that if you have the room on your HD and access to  
a reasonably fast internet connection get the full MacTeX package from  
<http://www.tug.org/mactex/>. Both MacTeX 2007 and 2008 can coexist  
and it is easy to switch between them. If you have updated packages by  
putting the newer versions into your personal tree (~/Library/ 
texmf/...) or the local system tree (/usr/local/texlive/txmf- 
local/...) you should probably backup those directory trees and remove  
the extra packages. You'll also need to run updmap-sys to install any  
fonts and font maps you have in those two trees. Don't forget to use

sudo texhash

if you change anything in the local system tree.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)