Formatting Information

A.2.1 Unix and GNU/Linux

Users of modern GNU/Linux systems may not even need the TEX Collection DVD, as TEX installation packages are available online, built into the package manager for your system (see the note ‘Choice of TEX Live for Linux users’ above).>

Figure A.1: Installing TEX Live from Synaptic, an Ubuntu package manager

If your system has a graphical package manager (eg Synaptic or Software, see Figure A.1 above), run it and install texlive-full (Ubuntu etc) or texlive-scheme-full (Red Hat etc), ghostscript, gv, okular, biber, kile (or texstudio or emacs), and jabref. Some of them may already be installed on your system. Go and have a cup of coffee while they automatically install all the necessary components.

The Ubuntu Software Centre only allows one package to be installed at a time, so you may prefer to use a typed command in a console window (other Linux users may prefer this approach anyway). The command name varies from distribution to distribution; but two common ones are apt (Ubuntu) and dnf (Red Hat):

sudo apt install texlive-full biber ghostscript gv \
  okular biber kile texstudio emacs jabref

sudo dnf install texlive-scheme-full biber ghostscript gv \
  okular biber kile texstudio emacs jabref

Unfortunately, the Okular and Evince PDF/DVI viewers have cumbersome interfaces: Okular prematurely replaced two older and much better-designed viewers, kdvi and kpdf; but you could install qpdfview instead, which is faster and lighter.

Unix and GNU/Linux installers

I strongly recommend this method for most GNU/Linux users. You should only need to install from the TEX Collection DVD if you are using an older, hand-built, or commercial Unix system which has no package manager, or where the version provided by the package manager is seriously out of date.

The date of the version can be a drawback: the Linux repository versions of TEX Live can be up to a year out of date, because of the enormous volunteer effort required to put them together. For new users this should not be a concern, as most updates do not seriously affect core facilities. If there are very recently-updated packages you badly need, you can install them separately, using the instructions in § 3.2 above.

If you do decide to switch to the TEX Live DVD or download, make sure you completely uninstall and purge the texlive-full or texlive-scheme-full package first, otherwise your system will get hopelessly confused. This will leave your system in a conflicted state, because to preserve dependencies it will want to uninstall all the packages above that depend on TEX. The solution is a ‘shim’ Debian package that pretends that the Debian distribution of TEX Live is still installed, while actually using the DVD-installed version.

After installation, run texconfig (see Figure A.2 below) in a terminal window to adjust your local settings. This is a console utility, so type texconfig just to adjust your own personal settings, or sudo texconfig to adjust them system-wide (for all users). In the utility, use the arrow keys to go up and down the options, and the TAB key to jump to (and switch between) the OK, Cancel, and other ‘buttons’ at the foot of the screen. The spacebar or the Enter key selects a menu item or button. Most settings are correct as installed, but you might want to change one of the following:

• the first option, DEST, lets you specify whether you normally want to print straight onto the printer, or ‘print’ into a file (to attach to email or upload somewhere)

• the default paper size (the PAPER option), if the installed size is not your most common one (A4 or Letter)

• the printer resolution (the MODE option), where you can adjust your printer settings; this allows you to fine-tune it for, say, a typesetter that you want to send output to instead of your own printer;

• in the DVIPS option you can adjust your printer OFFSET (left and top margins), which is useful for older, less accurate printers.

You may also need the REHASH option later on. It is used to update TEX’s fast-find database (see step 4 above) on multiuser shared systems after adding new or updated packages.

Figure A.2: Running the post-installation program texconfig

If your printer is a conventional home or office ink-jet or laser printer, and is not shown, the LaserJet5 setting (600dpi) is probably a good bet. While still in the utility, you can test the margin settings in another window by running the testpage.tex document through LATEX (by typing latex testpage and responding to the questions about paper size and double-sided printing). Print the resulting .dvi file with the command dvips -f testpage | lpr and adjust the margins in texconfig if necessary. These adjustments are not usually needed with PDF output.

A.2.2 Apple Mac OS X

Double-click the MacTeX-yyyy-DVD.mpkg package in the mactex folder of the TEX Collection DVD (replace the yyyy with the year of your distribution as shown on the DVD sleeve). Install the package in the normal Mac way by dragging the package icon onto the hard disk icon.

If you don’t have the DVD, download the MacTeX.pkg package from http://tug.org/mactex/mactex-download.html and click it in your Downloads to start the installation.

Depending on how your Mac is set up, you may be asked to download and install the developer tools during the TEX installation. Do so.

When it’s all finished, open your Applications folder in the Finder and go to the TEX subfolder and drag TEXshop out onto your Dock. TEXshop is the editor supplied with MacTEX which you use for writing your documents.

If you are going to use Adobe Acrobat Reader instead of Preview, make sure you clear the font cache and set the resolution to the system default (112dpi) otherwise you may get very weird displays.

If you are using the El Capitan version of the operating system, it is possible that TEXshop will not recognise the folder where MacTEX installed the system. If you get an error claiming your preferred LATEX engine does not exist in /usr/texbin, then use the TEXshop PreferencesEngine menu to change the first Path Setting to /Library/TeX/texbin.

If you are unused to installing Mac software, here’s a click-by-click guide:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello, World!
\end{document}

A.2.3 Microsoft Windows

You can install MiKTEX from the TEX Collection DVD or by download from the MiKTEX web site.

If your system has auto-run turned off, insert the DVD, go to the protext folder, and double-click on the Setup.exe program as shown in Figure A.3 below. Continue from § A.2.3.6 below below.

Figure A.3: The ProTEXt setup program on the TEX Collection DVD

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello, World!
\end{document}