On Tue, 21 May 2002, Christopher Pinon wrote: > I'm new to teTeX but have used LaTeX on another platform. I'm getting > ready to migrate to teTeX for full-time use and have a couple of questions > about adding packages and fonts, and even updating LaTeX, in teTeX. If I > understand well, I should preferably add local packages and fonts to a new > texmf-tree and make Kpathsea aware of this tree. Is there a generally > preferred location for such a new texmf-tree, or does everyone just choose > a place that s/he likes best? When it comes to updating LaTeX itself, am I > right to assume that I should overwrite the standard texmf-tree? In > principle, I guess, I could also add a new LaTeX version to my new > texmf-tree, but this seems less efficient. (I'm using teTeX 1.0.6 from > Debian Potato.)
Some people have $HOME/texmf, others make a /usr/local[/share]/texmf. You may also want to have a texmf-fonts directory as suggested in some recent ConTeXt docs. Most people either use the names in the default texmf.cnf or edit that file to match their own preferences. If you expect to install updated linux distributions, you may want to leave the distribution "as is", and make all the changes in your own tree[s] so you don't loose any changes when you update the distribution (or change to a different linux distribution). You can do this by putting your edited copy of texmf.cnf in a place you choose and setting the TEXMFCNF environment variable. This can be helpful in troubleshooting because you can easily revert to the original distributed configuration by unsetting TEXMFCNF. A disadvantage is that you could end up using outdated versions of packages you installed after updating your distribution. There is nothing magic about latex -- as long as you understand how latex finds files you can make sure that you are using any update that you install. With kpathsea there isn't a significant runtime penalty to having multiple trees with old and new versions of latex, and the disk space required for a latex distribution is rarely a concern these days. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
