TeTeX, TeXLive & mpm : which one?

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jhwh · Post by **jhwh** » Sun Jun 11, 2006 1:28 pm

Things seem to change in the TeX-world. As for now I'm using TeTeX 3.0_p1-r2 and all is going well.
What is the benefit of changing to TeXLive or mpm(MiKTeX)? Are the packages newer, is there a better way to install fonts, packages, is TeXLive the future of TeTeX, etc. ?

And of course: Do you need to use only one system or can they be combined? Will everything work as I'm converting to another (pdflatex is my main worry)? Use Kile as editor...

Koen Wybo

Angrybob · Post by **Angrybob** » Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:50 am

there's no real need to upgrade, although tetex has recently been abandoned by its creator and wont be getting any more updates... he suggests texlive as a good replacement but that is currently hard masked

BlackEdder · Post by **BlackEdder** » Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:57 am

I'm gonna wait till texlive hits stable and then maybe update.

nabla² · Post by **nabla²** » Sat Jun 17, 2006 8:32 am

I suppose using tetex is the most stable at the moment. You could use mpm to update or add some packages which are independent from the system it is used on (so not pdflatex!) because mpm uses the windows miktex packages. All the additional packages go to /usr/local/share/texmf, so they will be twice on the hd if you update.
I chose Texlive (the ebuild from bugs.gentoo) which has some more recent packages. The ebuild on bugs even patches Texlive to the recent stable pdflatex. So far I had no problems.

Massimo B. · Post by **Massimo B.** » Sun Dec 31, 2006 12:36 pm

I was pointed to texlive since [bug=159514]I was looking for a missing package floatrow[/bug] on tetex. Then I was told on #latex channel that tetex is expiring while texlive is the future.
Currently app-text/texlive is [M] masked for ppc. Is there a reason?

Current state of tex distributions on gentoo over archs:

Code: Select all

marialin ~ # dep -k  tetex
app-text/tetex:
          |                           s
          |                   p       p
          |                   p       a   x
          |                   c       r   8
          |                   -       c   6
          | a a             p m     s -   -
          | l m   h i m m   p a s   p f   f
          | p d a p a 6 i p c c 3   a b x b
          | h 6 r p 6 8 p p 6 o 9 s r s 8 s
          | a 4 m a 4 k s c 4 s 0 h c d 6 d
----------+---------------v----------------
2.0.2-r5  | + + + + + + + + + + + + +   +
2.0.2-r8  | + + + + + + ~ + + + + + +   +
2.0.2-r9  | + + + + + + ~ ~ + ~ + + +   +
3.0-r3    | ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~   ~ ~ ~ ~   ~   ~
3.0-r4    | ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~   ~ ~ ~ ~   ~   ~
3.0_p1    | ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~   ~ ~ ~ ~   ~   ~
3.0_p1-r1 | ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~   ~ ~ ~ ~   ~   ~
3.0_p1-r2 | ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~   ~ ~ ~ ~   ~   ~
3.0_p1-r3 > ~ + + + + +   + + ~ + + +   + ~
marialin ~ # dep -k  texlive
app-text/texlive:
     |                           s
     |                   p       p
     |                   p       a   x
     |                   c       r   8
     |                   -       c   6
     | a a             p m     s -   -
     | l m   h i m m   p a s   p f   f
     | p d a p a 6 i p c c 3   a b x b
     | h 6 r p 6 8 p p 6 o 9 s r s 8 s
     | a 4 m a 4 k s c 4 s 0 h c d 6 d
-----+---------------v----------------
2005 x   ~                         ~

nabla² · Post by **nabla²** » Sun Dec 31, 2006 2:17 pm

AFAIK the devs are not really sure how to procede. Unfortunately, this information is rather old. Just FYI, texlive 2006 is soon to come...

Massimo B. · Post by **Massimo B.** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 1:11 pm

Actually on Latex groups everyone recommends to switch to texlive when I come with problems.
I had problems with hyperref which is from 2003 on tetex. There are newer versions up to 2006.
We can hold the tetex branch but I would like to see some progress on the texlive ebuild.

oldefortran · Post by **oldefortran** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 2:54 pm

Yes indeed! We need TeXLive NOW!

How hard can it be to build a tex distribution that just includes everything?
I must ask since I really don't know.

Massimo B. · Post by **Massimo B.** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 4:18 pm

First I thought it would be nice to have a meta distribution of latex, so every package would get an ebuild on gentoo.
But now that I'm more familiar with latex i understand that would be hard to maintain, and it's good to have a complete latex distributution.

I tried app-text/texlive-2005 which has 390M (!). I tried because I noticed some quite old packages on tetex like hyperref from 2003. But then I figured out that texlive-2005 has also this old package without upgrading to more recent hyperref. Don't know about the status of ver.2006, but as for 2005 I switched back to tetex (seen that I need an equal setup on x86 @work and ppc @home currently writing my thesis).

nabla² · Post by **nabla²** » Fri Feb 09, 2007 2:43 pm

Any news from the developer what they plan?

pindar · Post by **pindar** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 6:49 pm

TeXLive 2007 was released last week. It's a massive download (935 MB!), and given its structure (one huge iso.zip file), it will be almost impossible to make the download significantly smaller for gentoo or split it into several smaller packages. Also, the fact that one .iso contains everything you'll need is quite convenient. So yes, I am wondering if the effort to integrate this into the portage system will be successful, and I certainly do hope so.

In other news, debian has had TeXLive 2007 packages out for quite a while now...

V-Li · Post by **V-Li** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 7:34 pm

mpm is just experimental and has no binaries. It is a test for the Unix port of MiKTeX, so don't use it. TeXLive is the future, just download the ISO and install it into /usr/local/ so you can get rid of it fast (put app-text/texlive in package.provided).
Some packages have problems, app-emacs/auctex has been prepared by me, some more help has been given in http://www.faulhammer.org/index.php?opt ... d=99999999.
TeX in Gentoo has no maintainer at the moment, I would like to but have higher priorities. So every help is welcome, the recruiting process isn't that hard.

Nerdanel · Post by **Nerdanel** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 12:37 am

I'm trying to do an important latex document with a few diagrams in it and some Greek letters in the diagrams. Unfortunately dia (how come there doesn't seem to be a better diagram program for Linux?) and tetex seem to have parted ways. They've always used to be a tricky couple, but this time it's increasingly looking like I'll either have to install texlive by hand (does it work nicely with Kile?) or accept the pain of programming pstricks by hand.

oldefortran · Post by **oldefortran** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 6:30 am

Or you could use xfig.

In Xfig you write greek labels as textlabels with the text $\beta$ and then export as Latex and eepic macros. Then run elaps (part of the epix package) to convert the eepic file to eps.
Or perhaps there's another way of using eepic pictures in latex.

Xfig and Dia is different kind of programs so it might not work for you.

V-Li · Post by **V-Li** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 6:50 am

Nerdanel wrote:I'm trying to do an important latex document with a few diagrams in it and some Greek letters in the diagrams. Unfortunately dia (how come there doesn't seem to be a better diagram program for Linux?) and tetex seem to have parted ways. They've always used to be a tricky couple, but this time it's increasingly looking like I'll either have to install texlive by hand (does it work nicely with Kile?) or accept the pain of programming pstricks by hand.

Or you could specify your problem.

Massimo B. · Post by **Massimo B.** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 8:48 am

Nerdanel wrote:...Unfortunately dia ... and tetex seem to have parted ways.

For my thesis this combination worked. I exported to .eps from dia and used a script like this, but did some modifications on this script (I'll send you by PM, if you're interested). Was kind of tricky to find this way, maybe better join the comp.text.tex newsgroup or your local one.

Nerdanel · Post by **Nerdanel** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 2:01 pm

Explaining:

First Dia started to add escapes to my $\tau$ arrow tags and my Scandinavian letters. There didn't seem to be any way around it (there's supposed to be one but it didn't work the last I tried) so I decided I'd just have to remove the escapes manually. But now after a break and on a new computer Dia is producing pstricks tex that comes out malformed (the arrows aren't even close to pointing at the bubbles and the bubbles themselves are seen as if through a double vision), probably because it's aiming for texlive and I have tetex.

eps export has never worked for me. I tried it again and it still produces errors. (Perhaps it could be cleaned up with that script...)

I read on the net that Dia's new pgf export does not escape the texts, which would be wonderful news. Unfortunately the pgf export also uses commands that don't appear to be implemented in the latest tetex, even when I /usepackage everything.

I'm still pretty new to latex. My text looks wonderful but my diagrams have exhibited all sorts of weird problems. I got things sorted out once but then Dia broke them again.

I'm trying xfig now. I doesn't look to particularly usable... I just want to have vector graphics of fixed size circles, arrows between the circles, and tags that are not limited to American ASCII. How hard that can be? (A bit later: I think I'm getting the hang of xfig. It may be slightly nicer than pstricks (not nearly as usable as Dia though, and Dia is far from perfect), but on the other hand if I use pstricks I'll have no export problems ever...)

BlackEdder · Post by **BlackEdder** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 3:43 pm

You could try and take a look at tioga. Although you will need to "program" your figures, they will look nice (and once you get the hang of it it is quite easy). They also integrate perfectly with latex.

nabla² · Post by **nabla²** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 3:54 pm

@V-Li
I wrote a small guide on the Gentoo Wiki while I was installing TeXLive. Is it better to set the ROOTPATH or add it before emerging? Somehow it did not work to add texlive to package.provided. I had to add tetex. Do you know why?

I chose an additional folder for texmf-site to have my manually installed files and the one by portage separated. Are files by portage to be installed in TEXMFSITE in general? If yes, should I file a bug report for gnuplot-4.2_rc1 because it uses TEXMLOCAL or Maxima which uses /usr/share/texmf/?

Thx

EDIT: Added Maxima.

V-Li · Post by **V-Li** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 5:49 pm

nabla² wrote:@V-Li
I wrote a small guide on the Gentoo Wiki while I was installing TeXLive. Is it better to set the ROOTPATH or add it before emerging? Somehow it did not work to add texlive to package.provided. I had to add tetex. Do you know why?

I chose an additional folder for texmf-site to have my manually installed files and the one by portage separated. Are files by portage to be installed in TEXMFSITE in general? If yes, should I file a bug report for gnuplot-4.2_rc1 because it uses TEXMLOCAL or Maxima which uses /usr/share/texmf/?

It is a good recommendation to avoid file collisions, so maybe you should file that bug. TEXMFSITE was just created for packages installing into the TeXMF tree. app-text/tetex is pulled in by default (and is only virtual/texlive not masked), that's why you need to add that.
What do you mean by adding or setting ROOTPATH?

nabla² · Post by **nabla²** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 6:34 pm

V-Li wrote:
nabla² wrote:@V-Li
I wrote a small guide on the Gentoo Wiki while I was installing TeXLive. Is it better to set the ROOTPATH or add it before emerging? Somehow it did not work to add texlive to package.provided. I had to add tetex. Do you know why?

I chose an additional folder for texmf-site to have my manually installed files and the one by portage separated. Are files by portage to be installed in TEXMFSITE in general? If yes, should I file a bug report for gnuplot-4.2_rc1 because it uses TEXMLOCAL or Maxima which uses /usr/share/texmf/?
It is a good recommendation to avoid file collisions, so maybe you should file that bug. TEXMFSITE was just created for packages installing into the TeXMF tree. app-text/tetex is pulled in by default (and is only virtual/texlive not masked), that's why you need to add that.
What do you mean by adding or setting ROOTPATH?

I'll file the reports and point to your solution in app-emacs/auctex. Maybe this should be integrated in an eclass.

You probably mean virtual/tetex (not texlive). Does it depend equally on tetex or texlive (is there an ebuild to check it, I was not able to find it)? I unmasked the latter (and had it installed before TL07) so I thought texlive is just as good as tetex.

I added the TL binaries to PATH and ROOTPATH so I did not need to add additional ROOTPATH information when building auctex. I AFAICS think this is a good idea although you did it manually in your auctex installation guide. I just want to be sure that this is no severe fault.

thx

V-Li · Post by **V-Li** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 10:41 am

nabla² wrote:
V-Li wrote:
nabla² wrote:@V-Li
I wrote a small guide on the Gentoo Wiki while I was installing TeXLive. Is it better to set the ROOTPATH or add it before emerging? Somehow it did not work to add texlive to package.provided. I had to add tetex. Do you know why?

I chose an additional folder for texmf-site to have my manually installed files and the one by portage separated. Are files by portage to be installed in TEXMFSITE in general? If yes, should I file a bug report for gnuplot-4.2_rc1 because it uses TEXMLOCAL or Maxima which uses /usr/share/texmf/?
It is a good recommendation to avoid file collisions, so maybe you should file that bug. TEXMFSITE was just created for packages installing into the TeXMF tree. app-text/tetex is pulled in by default (and is only virtual/texlive not masked), that's why you need to add that.
What do you mean by adding or setting ROOTPATH?
I'll file the reports and point to your solution in app-emacs/auctex. Maybe this should be integrated in an eclass.

You probably mean virtual/tetex (not texlive). Does it depend equally on tetex or texlive (is there an ebuild to check it, I was not able to find it)? I unmasked the latter (and had it installed before TL07) so I thought texlive is just as good as tetex.

I added the TL binaries to PATH and ROOTPATH so I did not need to add additional ROOTPATH information when building auctex. I AFAICS think this is a good idea although you did it manually in your auctex installation guide. I just want to be sure that this is no severe fault.

thx

As long as the TeXLive binaries are found by Portage. PATH is reconstructed without PATH from the environment (which is good), so you must inject it somehow...by which means does not matter.
Yes, virtual/tetex and it is defined in ${PORTDIR}/profiles/base/virtuals

Nerdanel · Post by **Nerdanel** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 5:58 pm

I decided to get texlive, but it turned out that there was no install CD for amd64/x86_64 and I have no DVD drive. I don't know if there's any way to install from a DVD iso, but if there is one I don't know it. Why can't the texlive people do installs like normal folks?

Plan B: Redoing all of those diagrams in xfig. (I'll do a test diagram first, of course.) If that doesn't work, it's programming time. Or it's the time to visit my parents for whom I installed Kubuntu...

EDIT - I changed my mind. I'll check out the patch in this bug report first. It'd be great if it worked, since an up-to-date and working pgf would solve my problems without need for bigger changes.

nabla² · Post by **nabla²** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 6:08 pm

Nerdanel wrote:I decided to get texlive, but it turned out that there was no install CD for amd64/x86_64 and I have no DVD drive. I don't know if there's any way to install from a DVD iso, but if there is one I don't know it. Why can't the texlive people do installs like normal folks?

You can use

Code: Select all

mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro /pfad/image.iso /mnt/mountpoint

to mount the image and install it.

Nerdanel · Post by **Nerdanel** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 8:05 pm

As it turned out that things had changed after the patch in the bug report, so that not only pgf had been hard masked, tetex ebuild had been modified in at least two places to prevent installing pgf, I gradually realized that perhaps I should stop my efforts to make an overlay version of tetex that does not block pgf. So I installed texlive.

It works! It works!

(EDIT - It doesn't, really... Or at least Kile doesn't.

I thought postscript still worked, but I was looking at an old version of my document.)

KDVI relies on the kpsewhich program to locate font files on your hard disc and to generate PK fonts, if necessary.

There were problems running kpsewhich. As a result, some font files could not be located, and your document might be unreadable.

Possible reason: The kpsewhich program is perhaps not installed on your system, or it cannot be found in the current search path.

What you can do: The kpsewhich program is normally contained in distributions of the TeX typesetting system. If TeX is not installed on your system, you could install the TeTeX distribution (www.tetex.org). If you are sure that TeX is installed, please try to use the kpsewhich program from the command line to check if it really works.

kpsewhich isn't on my PATH. I don't get any fonts at all. Argh. Do I need to edit on the command line? I really like Kile. In fact I'm considering using xfig and ancient tetex as long as I get to use Kile.

EDIT - kpsewhich doesn't exist under /usr so this isn't merely a path problem. My system is more broken than ever.

EDIT YET AGAIN - kpsewhich does exist under /usr. find just didn't find it. Probably because it was too deep. I'll just need to add /usr/local/texlive/current/bin/x86_64-linux to my PATH. (Goes to look how it's done. I've never had to do that in Gentoo before.)

WILL THESE EDITS NEVER END? - I got things working again.

Unfortunately "things" don't include the ever-painful Dia-to-tex export. I'm trying to find if Dia's many export modes contain one that works.

EDIT I HOPE FOR THE FINAL TIME - Ok, so I'll export as pstricks tex, search-and-replace all scaleboxes with psscaleboxes, all escaped taus with non-escaped taus, and fix a couple of Scandinavian letters in the same way. I probably could have done this in tetex without updating to livetex... If this goes on, I'll have to bite the bullet and learn how to script with sed. Dia, you SUCK.

However, the people in this thread do not suck. I want to thank you all.

:):)

EDIT AGAIN - YES AGAIN - AGAINST ALL HOPE AND SENSE THIS POST GETS EDITED AGAIN - Grrr...

Apparently I didn't look carefully enough. In DVI my biggest (and last) diagram has horizontal alignment problems. But this is nothing compared to the fact that the postscript version has the arrow tags way above the actual diagram and the pdf version doesn't compile! I'm supposed to print this thing out somehow, you know. I just want to say again that I hate Dia for not being able to export anything out of a wet paper bag.