# Questions on teTeX



## y2s82 (Dec 23, 2009)

I'm a long time Windows user who've been longing to change to FreeBSD for some years now.  For preparation, I've slowly changed my favorite Windows programs with the multiplateform software.  One of them was gvim with latex.

While using Windows, for latex, I used MikTeX.  Gvim had the vim-latex package installed.  With few tweaks, I was outputing pdf files for letters, papers, slide shows, and whatever else I liked.  I fell in love.  And everytime I needed additional packages, the pdflatex would simply download them from CTAN automatically whenever i hit \ll on gvim.  (\ll being the keystrokes telling vim-latex to compile)  I've grown accustomed to this and have already used it for several years at my workplace.

Some months ago, I finally made the transition to FreeBSD; I've done this before for my personal computer, but this time, I did it for my work computer, too, to finally lose ties with all that says M$.  And though not everything is perfect, I've been relatively happy, until few hours ago.

I'm trying to write a letter to a student of mine who sent me a Christmas card.  I wanted to put a background picture on the letter to make it look like a Christmas card.  In MikTex, this was as easy as simply putting in the necessary \usepackage{...} lines, hit \ll, and wait; the pdflatex will fetch any missing sty files and compile it.  With teTeX, it says sty not found.  I have been searching around and found that i need to do this manually.  I've been trying to find where to put the sty files, but to no avail.  They say i should put it into /usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex, which i read as /usr/local/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex, but /usr/local/share/texmf-tetex did not exist.  There was few other /usr/local/share/texmf-* destinations, but wasn't sure which one i was suppose to use.

Is there a way to have this done automatically, as it was the case with MikTeX?  If not, what is the exact steps I should take to install the latex packages once downloaded?
It's going to be ironic how the very program I learned to use to make my transition to *nix may end up be the center of reasons why I'm forced to switch back to Windows...


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## y2s82 (Dec 23, 2009)

Just to add:
I am sorry if i'm posting on a wrong forum.  I thought perhaps freebsd had different folder setup than other teTeX distributions geared towards linux (and the howto's designed for them)  Sorry and thank you for at least reading.


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## graudeejs (Dec 23, 2009)

You probably should look at
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=8292

*Tex in ports is old


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## y2s82 (Dec 23, 2009)

Thank you for the link.  I did end up on that site a number of times while searching for other methods.  I dismissed it thinking perhaps texlive is not yet entirely compatible with freebsd; i thought it'd otherwise be in the ports already.  I suppose i'll be trying texlive now.  

The question is, in the readme, it says i need to set the PATH accordingly; can this be elaborated a bit?  the only path value I know are at the .shrc and .profile on my account; are they the ones the author is talking about?  Would I have to adjust it for every account on the computer?

I also suspect that I better uninstall teTeX.  make deinstall clean on the meta port seems insignificant.  should i do that to teTeX-base? any other ones?

thank you and sorry for the trouble.


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## graudeejs (Dec 23, 2009)

Check the new howto in howto section


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## oliverh (Dec 23, 2009)

y2s82 said:
			
		

> I'm a long time Windows user who've been longing to change to FreeBSD for some years now.  For preparation, I've slowly changed my favorite Windows programs with the multiplateform software.  One of them was gvim with latex.
> 
> While using Windows, for latex, I used MikTeX.  Gvim had the vim-latex package installed.  With few tweaks, I was outputing pdf files for letters, papers, slide shows, and whatever else I liked.  I fell in love.  And everytime I needed additional packages, the pdflatex would simply download them from CTAN automatically whenever i hit \ll on gvim.  (\ll being the keystrokes telling vim-latex to compile)  I've grown accustomed to this and have already used it for several years at my workplace.
> 
> ...




Have a look into Vermadens howto for the latest packages:

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=57789#post57789

TeX gets no upgrade because of some childish behavior among the responsible people, so you have to use external packages in FreeBSD to get the latest software and the best compatibility possible.


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## y2s82 (Dec 23, 2009)

thanx for the link!  i should've been more thorough with my search :s
i hope whoever is responsible become more responsible about their responsibility   I suppose i'll ask more questions to the howto faq.
thanx again.


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