#### Beyond Linux® From Scratch (systemd Edition) - Version 10.1

### Chapter 51. Typesetting

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# install-tl-unx

## Introduction to TeX Live and its installer

The TeX Live package is a comprehensive TeX document production system. It includes TeX, LaTeX2e, ConTeXt, Metafont, MetaPost, BibTeX and many other programs; an extensive collection of macros, fonts and documentation; and support for typesetting in many different scripts from around the world.

This page is for people who wish to use the binary installer to provide the programs, the scripts, and a lot of supporting files and documentation. The installer is updated frequently, so any published md5sum will soon be out of date. Newer versions of the installer are expected to work with these instructions, for so long as they install to a `2020/` directory.

There are two reasons why you may wish to install the binaries in BLFS: either you need a smaller install (e.g. at a minimum plain TeX without LaTeX2e, ConTeXt, etc), or you wish to use tlmgr to get updates whilst this version is supported (typically, until April of the year after it was released). For the latter, you might prefer to install in your `/home` directory as an unprivileged user, and to then make corresponding changes to the PATH in your `~/.bashrc` or equivalent.

This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.1 platform.

### Package Information

- Download (HTTP): http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz

- Download MD5 sum: Varies frequently

- Download size: 3.8 MB

- Estimated disk space required: 6.6 GB if everything is included

- Estimated build time: varies, depending on network speed and traffic

#### Recommended

GnuPG-2.2.27 (to validate both the initial downloads, and also any updates you might later make using tlmgr.)

#### Recommended (at runtime)

The binaries are mostly linked to included static libraries or general (LFS) system libraries, but a few of the programs and several scripts will fail if the following packages are not present:

ghostscript-9.53.3 is dynamically loaded by the external application dvisvgm, which is used by asy when that creates SVG files.

Xorg Libraries and libxcb-1.14 are needed for inimf, mf, pdfclose, pdfopen and xdvi-xaw. But if you are using asy, or using a TeX engine to create a PDF file, you will need an X Window System (for PDF files, this is to support a PDF viewer of your choice, for example epdfview-0.1.8).

the optional non-wide-character ncurses library (for "some binary-only application") from the bottom of the Ncurses page in LFS is needed for xindy.run which is used by xindy

The binary version of asy needs Freeglut-3.2.1.

### Note

As always with contributed binary software, it is possible that the required dependencies may change when the installer is updated. In particular, these dependencies have only been checked on x86_64.

Python-2.7.18 is used by many scripts. Ruby-3.0.0 is used by some scripts, mostly within mtx_context which is part of conTeXt, but also for one or two others, such as match_parens, which are generally useful. The perl module Tk, which needs to be run from an X11 session to run the tests and requires Tk-8.6.11.1, is used by one of the scripts for ptex (Japanese vertical writing), can be used by a conTeXt texfind script, and is needed for texdoctk (a GUI interface for finding documentation files and opening them with the appropriate viewer).

User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/tl-installer

## Binary Installation of TeX Live

The TeX Live set of programs with its supporting documents, fonts, and utilities is very large. The upstream maintainers recommend placing all files in a single directory structure. BLFS recommends `/opt/texlive`.

As with any other package, unpack the installer and change into its directory, `install-tl-<CCYYMMDD>`. This directory name changes when the installer is updated, so replace <CCYYMMDD> by the correct directory name.

### Note

The distribution binaries installed below may use static linking for general linux system libraries. Additional libraries or interpreters as specified in the dependencies section do not need to be present during the install, but the programs that need them will not run until their specific dependencies have been installed.

With all contributed binary software, there may be a mismatch between the builder's toolchain and your hardware. In most of TeX this will probably not matter, but in uncommon corner cases you might hit problems. e.g. if your x86_64 processor does not support 3dnowext or 3dnow, the 2014-06-28 binary failed in conTeXt when running LuaTeX, although lualatex worked, as did the i686 binaries on the same machine. In such cases, the easiest solution is to install texlive from source. Similarly, the x86_64 binary version of asy runs very slowly when creating 3-D diagrams.

Now, as the `root` user:

    TEXLIVE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/texlive ./install-tl

This command is interactive and allows selection or modification of platform, packages, directories, and other options. The full installation scheme will require about 4.9 gigabytes of disk space. The time to complete the download will depend on your internet connection speed and the number of packages selected.

## Command Explanations

`./install-tl --location http://mirror.aut.ac.nz/CTAN/systems/texlive/tlnet/`: use a variation of this if you wish to use a different mirror, e.g. because you are in New Zealand but the installer chooses to use an Australian mirror. The list of mirrors is at http://ctan.org/mirrors.

## Contents

Installed Programs: Over 300 binaries and symlinks to scripts
Installed Libraries: None
Installed Directories: /opt/texlive

### Short Descriptions

TeX programs | The programs included in TeX are too numerous to individually list. Please refer to the individual program HTML and PDF pages in the various html, man, or pdf files within the subdirectories of `2020/texmf-dist/`. Using texdoc pdflatex ( replace pdflatex with the command name ) may also be useful

Last updated on 2021-02-22 12:20:59 -0800

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