search

moewew / biblatex-ext

Extensions for the biblatex standard styles
LaTeX Project Public License v1.3c
24 stars 3 forks source link

Implementation in Texpad #2

Closed ghost closed 6 years ago

ghost commented 6 years ago

Hello,

I am quite new to using latex so I hope this question is not totally weird. I just got a suggestion in a forum to use the ext-authoryear style for redesigning the citationstyle. I was told to easily drag the files in my latex project folder to make it work.

So I did but I still get an error message which says "package not found"

Do you have any idea how I can get the ext-authoryear package to work with Texpad on a Mac? I am not using MacTex.

Felix

moewew commented 6 years ago

I wonder whoever gave you that idea ... ;-)

Anyway, there are a few things going on here. You may want to read a general introduction to TeX and LaTeX to understand what this is about. In order to use LaTeX you normally install a so-called TeX distribution. That distribution installs some binaries (such as pdfLaTeX, LuaLaTeX, ...) as well as further packages and means to use them. There are three major distributions nowadays (but there were/are more: https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/239199/)

  1. MikTeX for Windows, experimental support for Mac OS and Linux
  2. TeX live for Win, Linux and Mac
  3. MacTeX (based on TeX live) for Mac, naturally

You must have one of these installed to be able to use (La)TeX. It is via your TeX distribution that you install and update packages.

Texpad is only an editor, just like TeXworks, TeXstudio, ... You simply write your .tex files there. Most editors have options to call LaTeX and other auxiliary programmes for you. But they can not do that without an underlying TeX distribution. (See for example in "What if I haven’t yet installed LaTeX?" on Texpad's support pages)

Now MacTeX is based on TeX live and TeX live has the peculiarity that it is "frozen" for a few weeks a year and that you have to do a full re-install each year to continue to get updates. Have a look at https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/107017/35864 for explanations. MikTeX does not work like that and offers continuous updates all year round. biblatex-ext was first released after the TeX live freeze, so at the moment biblatex-ext is only available in MikTeX and in TeX live 2018 pretest (not for production use).

Since you are on a Mac you are most likely using MacTeX or raw TeX live, in both of these cases you will not be able to install biblatex-ext automatically at the moment.

If you want to use the package regardless, download the files from GitHub and place the .bbx, .cbx and .def files in the same directory as your main .tex file. Do not move them to a subdirectory.

If that does not help, please share more about your folder set-up, where exactly you placed which files, the error messages you receive, etc. etc.

ghost commented 6 years ago

Thanks so much I got some very smart supporters here ;)

I think this gave me an excellent overview across the whole topic plus solved my problem!

moewew commented 6 years ago

Very well. I'll close this ticket then.