TeX Live

Introduction

NEW: as of 12 Sept. 2008, TeXLive packages are available in extra for both arches, hence replacing the obsolete tetex. By installing the packages texlive-core (54MB) and its dependency texlive-bin (15MB), you will have a very solid and bleeding-edge typesetting system at your disposal!

Important information

• The installation now goes to /usr instead of /opt/texlive. Upon upgrading from the 2007 packages, you might encounter some error messages about binaries not found under /opt/texlive/bin: you can safely ignore them.

• Instead of upgrading, we strongly suggest you simply remove all your old texlive packages first, and then do a clean install under /usr.

• For reasons of space and because life is too short, we don't provide the documentation. You can consult it online at http://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/doc.html or on CTAN. Documentation packages might soon be available on [community] though.

• TeXLive (upstream) now provides a tool for incremental updates of CTAN packages. On that basis, we also plan to update our packages on a regular basis (we have written tools that almost automate that task).

• Some tools and utilities included in TeX Live rely on ghostscript, perl, and ruby.

• For help and information about TeXLive see: http://tug.org/texlive/doc.html and http://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html

• System-wide configuration files are under /usr/share/texmf-config. User-specific ones should be put under ~/.texlive/texmf-config. $TEXMFHOME is ~/texmf and $TEXMFVAR is ~/.texlive/texmf-var.

• A skeleton of a local texmf tree is at /usr/local/share/texmf: this directory is writable for members of the group tex. Users of TeXLive 2007 should move /opt/texlive/texmf-local accordingly or change the variable $TEXMFLOCAL in /usr/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf

List of all texlive-* packages

The texlive packages are arranged into to groups: texlive-most and texlive-lang (NB: the groups texlive-most-doc and texlive-lang-doc are currently not provided but might be re-added to community soon).

The essential package texlive-core contains the basic texmf-dist tree, while texlive-bin contains the binaries, libraries, and the texmf tree. texlive-core is based on the “medium” install scheme of the upstream distribution. All other packages are based on the eponymous collections in TeXLive. The following links bring to a list of the CTAN packages contained in each Arch package.

Group texlive-most

• texlive-bin
• texlive-core
• texlive-bibtexextra
• texlive-fontsextra
• texlive-formatsextra
• texlive-games
• texlive-genericextra
• texlive-htmlxml
• texlive-humanities
• texlive-latex3
• texlive-latexextra
• texlive-music
• texlive-pictures
• texlive-plainextra
• texlive-pstricks
• texlive-publishers
• texlive-science

NB: texlive-omega is no longer provided, and the omega and aleph binaries are not included in texlive-bin. They are unmaintained and obsolete. All files that depend on omega should have been removed. (Note that omega/aleph are still part of the official TeXLive DVD, but will probably disappear next year.)

Group texlive-lang

• texlive-langcjk
• texlive-langcyrillic
• texlive-langgreek
• texlive-langextra

NB: The latter replaces and provides texlive-lang{african, arab, armenian, croatian, hebrew, indic, mongolian, tibetan, vietnamese}.

Alternative: TeXLive network install

See http://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-140003

Alternative: TeX Live with loop-mounted DVD ISO

See TeXLive_from_iso (obsolete?)

See Also

For frequently asked qustions about TeX, TeXLive, and how it is packaged on arch, see the TeXLive FAQ.