[OS X TeX] How do I tell MacTeX about my user-install of Live TeX?

[Ross Moore]

Hello Chris,

On 07/03/2015, at 4:10, "Maloney, Christopher (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [C]" <maloneyc at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov> wrote:

> Now, how do I tell MacTeX's "TeX Distribution" utility (in System Preferences) about this installation of TeX Live, so that I can use MacTeX with it? If I need admin rights to do this, it would be okay -- I can ask our sysadmins to do this if it's a one-time thing. What I don't want is to be tied to asking them, for example, every time I want to install a new package.

If all you want is a place for new or updated packages, just create  
    ~/Library/texmf/
with sub folder hierarchies, e.g.
        ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex
        ~/Library/texmf/doc/latex
etc.
for your local variants.
This is how we do it for our server, which everyone uses to generate personalized, barcoded assignments for the students in our mathematics units.
The ~ here is for the web-user that runs when a student requests her/his assignment.

For you, ~ will be your own account, with your own ~/Library/ .

> 
> The comments to my question on SX indicate that there is a way to do this by tweaking the symlinks under /Library/TeX. I’ve had a look there, and these symlinks see pretty complicated! Is there an easy way (maybe a script) that will set up these symlinks automatically, if I just tell the sysadmins to run it for me, giving them the location of my local install?
> 
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Chris Maloney

Hope this helps,

    Ross