Additional packages for texlive?

holzschu / a-shell

A terminal for iOS, with multiple windows

BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License

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Additional packages for texlive? #314

Open alexeyignatiev opened 3 years ago

alexeyignatiev commented 3 years ago

Hi, @holzschu.

First of all, thanks a lot for such a great tool as a-shell! It's a pleasure to have C/C++, Python and *TeX working on an iPad.

And my apologies if the question is silly. I wonder if one can download an additional package for texlive and put it in ~/Library/texlive/texmf-local/ so that the *TeX engines would be able to find it? (I tried it but pdflatex failed to see the packages I put there. Is there a package caching step I am missing?)

Thanks, Alexey

holzschu commented 3 years ago

Hi Alexey, thanks for the kinds words. There are two answers to your question:

you can install additional packages in ~/Library/texlive/texmf-local/, but they have to follow the TeX directory structure (TDS), otherwise TeX won't be looking for them in the right place. You might have to regenerate the ls-R files (depending on how the TeX command looks for files).
in the current TestFlight version, you get texlive 2021, with almost all TeX packages, and a working tlmgr command, so you can actually install extra packages with tlmgr install package (and it will call mktexlsr itself). The TestFlight version is availabe here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/WUdKe3f4 (it's still in beta, as I am testing whether the features are working).

alexeyignatiev commented 3 years ago

Thank you! I installed the beta version.

Although tlmgr is now available (as is mxtexlsr), it does not seem to work properly. I am not sure why it happens but when I tried to do tlmgr update --self several times, it complained about unsupported container format xz.

This is weird because help -l shows xz as available. But it is true that whenever I run xz -h, a-Shell tells me xz: command not found.

After a number of attempts, tlmgr became unresponsive. Whatever I try to do with it, it just hangs. Is there a way to reset the state of the texlive distribution (including commands)?

I should also say that copying the packages into ~/Library/texlive/texmf-local/ and then running mktexlsr works. I was able to successfully install a couple of packages this way!

holzschu commented 3 years ago

Thanks for the warning. tlmgr requires xz, and xz is currently done with WebAssembly, and there seems to be an issue where there is both a $APPDIR/bin/xz and a $HOME/Documents/bin/xz. I need to fix that. I think you can fix things on your machine by moving ~/Documents/bin/xz out of the way.

There will still be the issue that xz is a bit slow, and thus tlmgr might take several seconds.

alexeyignatiev commented 3 years ago

Thank you, @holzschu. Hm, I don't think I have ~/Documents/bin in my installation. Somehow there is no such directory.

Also, I just wanted to let you know that file in the beta version is command not found too.

alexeyignatiev commented 3 years ago

So in my case, all the binaries are located in $APPDIR/bin. Interestingly, even if I try to run $APPDIR/bin/file or $APPDIR/bin/xz , they both fail with command not found message.

holzschu commented 3 years ago

Oh wait, I remember! That is something I have fixed since I released the beta. It will be in the next beta. WebAssembly execution is currently broken, so tlmgr won't work.

alexeyignatiev commented 3 years ago

I see, thanks!