[texworks] Script to install packages on-the-fly

[Stefan Löffler]

Howdy,

Am 2010-04-09 20:46, schrieb Herbert Schulz:
> Yes, tlmgr is part of MacTeX(TeX Live - TL) on the Mac. There is a beautiful front end, TeX Live Utility, that runs under OS X 10.5 and later too. Great for doing updates to the TL distribution.
>   

Yeah, I know. The point behind writing this script was not to bypass
that completely. But it's sometimes a fairly unnerving process (if you
have a bunch of missing files) to find all the packages and install them
(particularly so if the package name doesn't match the file's name). So
I wrote this script in order to make things easier for the end user and
to save some work, clicks, and time ;).

> The TeXworks feature sounds interesting. However, TL seems so complete that I only rarely find something I'm missing. There is a BasicTeX distribution (~85.2MB) for the Mac which is a highly stripped down version of TL and that feature would make lots of sense there.
>   

Exactly. If you installed a full version of TL, this script won't kick
in at all - or if it does it won't succeed because you're missing a file
that's not provided by TL and the script is only searching the TL
database. However, if you installed a medium-sized or even a basic
version, you may run into missing packages several times. Particularly
so if you get documents from other people, possibly working in different
fields (which happens to me quite often; I work in physics, so I have
the science packages installed, but not most of the extra languages or
law packages; nevertheless I'm asked for help on documents requiring
those packages from time to time).

So, all in all, I think it's just a tiny little step towards lowering
the entry barrier, in that the end user doesn't have to frequently deal
with (or mess with) the package database, but instead should (ideally)
get just what he needs.

Cheers,
Stefan