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$. And though not everything is perfect, I've been relatively happy, until few hours ago.
I'm trying to write a letter to a student of mine who sent me a Christmas card. I wanted to put a background picture on the letter to make it look like a Christmas card. In MikTex, this was as easy as simply putting in the necessary \usepackage{...} lines, hit \ll, and wait; the pdflatex will fetch any missing sty files and compile it. With teTeX, it says sty not found. I have been searching around and found that i need to do this manually. I've been trying to find where to put the sty files, but to no avail. They say i should put it into /usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex, which i read as /usr/local/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex, but /usr/local/share/texmf-tetex did not exist. There was few other /usr/local/share/texmf-* destinations, but wasn't sure which one i was suppose to use.
Is there a way to have this done automatically, as it was the case with MikTeX? If not, what is the exact steps I should take to install the latex packages once downloaded?
It's going to be ironic how the very program I learned to use to make my transition to *nix may end up be the center of reasons why I'm forced to switch back to Windows...
While using Windows, for latex, I used MikTeX. Gvim had the vim-latex package installed. With few tweaks, I was outputing pdf files for letters, papers, slide shows, and whatever else I liked. I fell in love. And everytime I needed additional packages, the pdflatex would simply download them from CTAN automatically whenever i hit \ll on gvim. (\ll being the keystrokes telling vim-latex to compile) I've grown accustomed to this and have already used it for several years at my workplace.
Some months ago, I finally made the transition to FreeBSD; I've done this before for my personal computer, but this time, I did it for my work computer, too, to finally lose ties with all that says M$. 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...
I suppose i'll ask more questions to the howto faq.