texlive-20220321-source
Introduction to TeX Live from source
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Note
According to https://www.tug.org/historic/ the master
site in France only supports ftp and rsync. Now that ftp is generally
deprecated, that page has links to mirrors, some of which support https,
e.g. in Utah and Chemntiz as well as in China. If you prefer to use a
different mirror from the example links here, you will need to navigate
to systems/historic/texlive/2022 or systems/texlive/2022
as the case may be.
Most of TeX Live can be built from source without a pre-existing
installation, but xindy (for indexing) needs
working versions of latex and
pdflatex when configure is run, and the test suite
and install for asy (for vector graphics) will fail
if TeX has not already been installed. Additionally,
biber is not provided within the
texlive source and the version of
dvisvgm in the
texlive tree cannot be built
if shared system libraries are used.
All of those packages are dealt with on their own pages and can be
built after installing this package. If you have not already done so, you
should start at Setting the PATH for TeX Live so that the final commands to
initialize the new installation will be found.
This package is known to build and work properly
using an LFS 11.3 platform.
Package Information
Required Additional Downloads
Much of the texlive environment (including scripts, documentation,
fonts, and various other files) is not part of the source tarball.
You must download it separately. This will give you all of the
additional files which are provided by a full install of the binary
version, there is no realistic way to restrict which parts get
installed.
Because of the size of this package, it is unlikely to be mirrored by
BLFS mirrors. In case of difficulty, go to http://www.ctan.org/mirrors/
to find a more-accessible mirror.
From the 2019 year, the tlpdb database of the packages within texlive is
no-longer installed with the source. But texdoc needs
a cache file derived from this (and will create the cache on its first
run).
TeX Live from source Dependencies
Recommended
a graphical environment
The source ships with its own versions of many
libraries, and will use them unless it is forced to use the system
versions. The following are recommended so that the system version
will be used:
Cairo-1.17.6,
Fontconfig-2.14.2,
FreeType-2.13.0,
GC-8.2.2,
Graphite2-1.3.14,
HarfBuzz-7.0.0 (built with graphite2 enabled),
ICU-72.1,
libpaper-1.1.24+nmu5 (used by at least context and xelatex),
and libpng-1.6.39
Furthermore, the instructions below assume you are using the layout
described in Setting the PATH for TeX Live.
Optional
The source ships with its own versions of several libraries which are either
not under active development, or only used for limited functionality. If
you install these, as with some other optional dependencies in this book you
will need to tell configure to use the system versions.
GD,
t1lib,
ZZIPlib,
TECkit
Runtime dependencies
Python-2.7.18 is used by many scripts - most are
unmaintained. Many invoke /usr/bin/env python, a couple
invoke /usr/bin/python. It is not generally known if
these will work with a symlink to python3 (as used in some
distros) and two from pythontex invoke python2.
Ruby-3.2.1 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-8.6.13, 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).
ps2pdf, from ghostscript-10.00.0, is
used by some utilities and scripts.
User Notes:
https://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/texlive
Installation of TeX Live
Install TeX Live by running the following commands:
![[Caution]](../images/caution.png)
Caution
If you wish to upgrade to current texlive
on an older system where extra packages (asymptote,
biber, dvisvgm, or
xindy) have been installed, you will need to
reinstall those as well as fixing up your PATH for
$TEXLIVE_PREFIX.
The shared libraries will be installed into a texlive directory.
As the root user, add it to
your /etc/ld.so.conf:
cat >> /etc/ld.so.conf << EOF
# Begin texlive addition
$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/lib
# End texlive addition
EOF
Note
A successful install requires some texlive
commands to be run as the root user, so we will export the TEXARCH
variable to let root use it.
Now, as a normal user:
export TEXARCH=$(uname -m | sed -e 's/i.86/i386/' -e 's/$/-linux/') &&
mkdir texlive-build &&
cd texlive-build &&
../configure \
--prefix=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX \
--bindir=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/bin/$TEXARCH \
--datarootdir=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX \
--includedir=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/include \
--infodir=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist/doc/info \
--libdir=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/lib \
--mandir=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist/doc/man \
--disable-native-texlive-build \
--disable-static --enable-shared \
--disable-dvisvgm \
--with-system-cairo \
--with-system-fontconfig \
--with-system-freetype2 \
--with-system-gmp \
--with-system-graphite2 \
--with-system-harfbuzz \
--with-system-icu \
--with-system-libgs \
--with-system-libpaper \
--with-system-libpng \
--with-system-mpfr \
--with-system-pixman \
--with-system-zlib \
--with-banner-add=" - BLFS" &&
make
To test the results, issue: make check.
Now, as the root user:
make install-strip &&
/sbin/ldconfig &&
make texlinks &&
mkdir -pv $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/tlpkg/TeXLive/ &&
install -v -m644 ../texk/tests/TeXLive/* $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/tlpkg/TeXLive/ &&
tar -xf ../../texlive-20220325-tlpdb-full.tar.gz -C $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/tlpkg
Note
Only run make texlinks once. If it is rerun,
it can change all the program symlinks so that they point to
themselves and are useless.
Now install the additional files as the
root user:
tar -xf ../../texlive-20220321-texmf.tar.xz -C $TEXLIVE_PREFIX --strip-components=1
It has been established by debian that the python
scripts in latex-make will work
with python3, so update them to invoke that by running
the following command as the root
user:
for F in $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist/scripts/latex-make/*.py ; do
sed -i 's%/usr/bin/env python%/usr/bin/python3%' $F
done
Still as the root user,
initialize the new system (the commands fmtutil-sys
--all and mtxrun --generate will produce
a lot of output):
mktexlsr &&
fmtutil-sys --all &&
mtxrun --generate
You can now proceed to asymptote-2.85,
biber-2.18, dvisvgm-3.0.3 and / or xindy-2.5.1 if you wish to install them.
Command Explanations
--prefix=, --bindir=, --datarootdir=, --infodir=, --mandir= ...
: these switches ensure that the files installed from source
will overwrite any corresponding files previously installed by
install-tl-unx so that the alternative methods of
installing texlive are consistent.
--includedir=, --libdir= ... : these switches ensure
that the libraries and include files will be within the directories for this
year's texlive.
--disable-static: This switch prevents
installation of static versions of the libraries.
--enable-shared: Use shared versions of
libkpathsea,
libptexenc,
libsynctex,
libtexlua52 and
libtexluajit.
--with-system-...: Unless this parameter is used,
the included versions of these libraries will be statically compiled
into the programs which need them. If you decided not to install a
recommended library, omit the corresponding switch.
--disable-dvisvgm: As noted above, the shipped version
of dvisvgm, which has modified configuration files, cannot be built with
shared system libraries.
--without-x: use this if you do not have Xorg installed.
/sbin/ldconfig: this has to be run here so that
make texlinks can use kpsewhich.
make texlinks : this runs the texlinks.sh script
to create symbolic links from formats to engines. In
practice, several of the targets such as xetex are now
separate binaries and for these it will report "file already exists".
tar -xf texlive-20220321-texmf.tar.xz -C $TEXLIVE_PREFIX --strip-components=1:
the tarball contains the files for the texmf-dist directory, and because
of its size we do not want to waste time and space untarring it and then
copying the files.
install -v -m644 ../texk/tests/TeXLive/*
$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/tlpkg/TeXLive/: This puts the perl
modules TLConfig.pm and TLUtils.pm
into the directory where the binary installer puts them - it is at the
start of the perl @INC@ PATH within texlive when installed using the above
configure switches. Without these modules, texlive is unusable.
mktexlsr: Create an ls-R file
which lists what was installed - this is used by kpathsea to find files.
fmtutil-sys --all: This initializes the TeX formats,
Metafont bases and Metapost mems.
mtxrun --generate: This initializes the ConTeXt system.
Contents
Installed Programs: Over 300 binaries and symlinks to scripts
Installed Libraries: libkpathsea.so,
libptexenc.so,
libsynctex.so,
libtexlua52.so,
libtexluajit.so
Installed Directories: $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/bin,
$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/include,
$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/lib,
$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist
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
2022/texmf-dist/.
Using texdoc pdflatex ( replace
pdflatex with the command name ) may also be
useful
|
libkpathsea.so
|
(kpathsearch) exists to look up a file in a list of directories
and is used by kpsewhich
|
libptexenc.so
|
is a library for Japanese pTeX (publishing TeX)
|
libsynctex.so
|
is the SyncTeX (Synchronize TeXnology) parser library
|
libtexlua52.so
|
provides Lua 5.2, modified for use with LuaTeX
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libtexluajit.so
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provides LuaJIT, modified for use with LuaJITTeX
|