[OS X TeX] adding packages to Basic Tex

[Alan Munn]

If you install BasicTeX you will get a very minimal TeX Live distribution, and you can then use TeXLive utility to install any extra packages you need.

Most of use avoid the trouble of this (disk space is generally cheap) and install the full Mac TeX and then use TeX Live utility to update everything, including installing any new packages that show up, whether we need them or not.

The vast majority of packages on in TeXLive I (or most of us) will never use, but it’s so much easier to just say “Update all” every so often than to actually have to make decisions on what to install.

Furthermore (and this is actually really important) the TeX Live package manager does not handle package dependencies, so if just update individual package you may encounter real difficulties which are sometimes very hard to track down.  This is especially true for packages that depend on the LaTeX3 code base, which is still in development, but has quite a few important packages that depend on it.

Alan

On Jul 15, 2015, at 3:49 PM, Nicolae Garleanu <garleanu at berkeley.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> My understanding is that I can manually copy any packages I want in ~/Library/texmf — indeed, I have some customized ones that I put there. Is there a way, however, to pick and choose packages distributed through Mac Tex to be added to my installation, perhaps even involving the Tex Live utility (I did search — ``filter’’ — in the  Packages tab of the Tex Live utility but didn’t find the packages I was looking for)? The advantages, as I see them, would be that I would avoid finding each package and downloading manually, and that any updates could be automatic. None of them is a big advantage. (Alternatively, I can just install the latest Mac Tex, which I may just end up doing.)
> 
> Nicolae 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Alan Munn
amunn at gmx.com




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