General ⇒ Adding packages.

[krz]

Ehhh.... I have another lamer's question. I'm fighting with adding packages for 7 hours and I still can't win.
I work on Mac (Leopard) and I need to add some packages. In manual I found an information I had to use 3 files *.sty, *.ps and *.cfg. In a chapter "Installation" I found sentenses like this "Put the file to the place where dvips expects it." The problem is I really don't know where it is. I copied it for example to ~/Library/texmf/dvips/ or ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/ (by the way I had to create a folder /texmf). I copied it to thousands of places, doing what I found on some forums etc but it still doesn't work.
Do you know what is the best way to add packages on Mac?

[frabjous]

Adding packages for seven hours manually? Unbelievable. Are these packages already on CTAN? If so, there's got to be an easier way.

But first things first, what LaTeX distribution are you using? What packages are you trying to add, and why?

[krz]

7 hours of searching informations and trying make them alive. Not only command+c command+v
Yes, packages are in CTAN base. Most of all I need to use "poligraf" of something like that to add crop marks, CMYK and everything that is needed to print a book.
And I use macTeX and as a compiler (?) TexShop.

[frabjous]

You should take my advice with a grain of salt, since I don't use a mac. (I'm not sufficiently impressed by shiny white boxes to be willing to pay Apple take a free Unix-based OS and make it less functional than it would be otherwise. )

However, if I'm not mistaken, MacTeX is built on top of TeXlive, and you can use TeXlive's package manager to automatically install packages. From a terminal:

Code: Select all

sudo tlmgr install <package-name>

should automatically install a CTAN package into the right locations.

If you want a graphical front-end to tlmgr, look at mactlmgr.

That said, you should also be able to install packages manually into your local TeX tree ; just be sure to run sudo texhash afterwards. Details here. If you have questions about where things go, look here, and/or use the kpsepath utility.

[krz]

Thanks! It works great. Unfortunately I cannot start up one important package (manually), but maybe I still don't know how to use it.
I know what you mean. Sometimes it's strange to use open source software on a computer from a big corporation. But I'm untalented person in computer's matter. I've never could configure my linux properly.