[OS X TeX] Lost in Mac space

[Victor Ivrii]

Let make things clear:


1) There are plenty of things which are part of TeXLive: with full
install you have at this moment 1700+ packages/documentclasses and
there is no point for you to do anything but to update them through
tlmgr: type in terminal

%sudo tlmgr --update-all

How do you know that the package is a part of TL and installed on your
computer (as part of texlive)? In terminal type

%tlmgr show beamer

It returns some info ...
Installed:  Yes
Revision:   11236
Collection: collection-latexrecommended

So, it is installed as part of TL2008 (if the answer is No but you want it

% sudo tlmgr install beamer

(I took beamer as an example)

% tlmgr show animfig
tlmgr: cannot find animfig

It means that this package is not part of TL2008 (or may be does not
exist at all - but this is an easy case). So, the question is what to
do with such package?


2) OK, you want to install some package foo which is not part of TL.
The best thing would be to get it in TDS form:

ftp://ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/install/macros/latex/contrib

and find packages in tds form here.

Download it. Where you want to install it? You can have many TDS trees
but let do it in a simplest way (assuming that you are the only user).

Assume that you downloaded it to your desktop. Open your home folder.
Open Library. Is there folder called texmf?
If not, create it (it is NOT TeXShop folder).
If yes, drag foo.tds.zip there (into texmf). Unzip it.


You are done.

3) If package is not in tds form, I would not recommend installing it
for absolute newbies and UNIX virgins

HTH

Victor








-- 
========================
Victor Ivrii, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii