[texhax] Question About Adding Packages to Mac Version of LaTeX

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 6 June 2010 Uwe Ziegenhagen wrote:

 > 1) Yes, sure.
 > 
 > 1a) If you have installed the TeX Live edition for Mac, PSTricks is
 > included. You can easily check with one of the examples from
 > http://www.tug.org/PSTricks/main.cgi?file=examples
 > 
 > 2) CTAN: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/graphics/pstricks/
 > 
 > To install, you should create a localtexmf folder, etc.,
 > etc. (Takes some time) Just try first if it hasn't been installed.

Even if it's not installed already, I strongly recommend to use the
package manager in order to install missing packages.  Whatever you
put into TEXMFLOCAL or TEXMFHOME, you have to maintain forever.

I'm sure that pstricks is installed already.  James said that he
installed everything.  What confuses me a bit is that later he said
"After installing LaTeX...".  I hope that this doesn't mean that he
installed scheme-basic (which provides minimal LaTeX support) instead
of scheme-full.  However, with the package manager it should be
possible to correct this quite easily.

There is absolutely no need to install anything from CTAN in
TEXMFLOCAL.  There are a few exceptions, though (inappropriate
licenses, ...).  But pstricks is free and is part of any recent TeX
distribution. 

BTW, unless you didn't tell the installer that it shouldn't install any
documentation (highly deprecated), you get documentation for each
package you've installed.  This means that you can be sure that a
particular package is installed if its documentation is available.

Thus, the easiest way to find out whether pstricks is installed is to
type

   texdoc pstricks

on the command line.  I'm advertising texdoc though I know that Mac
users are usually not as familiar with the command line as Linux
users, but IMO texdoc is extremely useful, though.  Please type

   texdoc texdoc

in order to get its documentation.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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