/haskell-strelitzia

Install TeX Live packages on the fly

Primary LanguageHaskellMIT LicenseMIT

Strelitzia

Suppose you have installed a minimal TeX Live and you want to produce a pdf via, say,

$ pdflatex main.tex

It probably won't work owing to missing packages from a still younger TeX Live. It is a work for strelitzia:

$ strelitzia main.tex

It coordinates a couple of actors: it runs pdflatex main.tex, extracts from the log the names of the missing files, invokes tlmgr to determine the parent packages and makes tlmgr install them. How the command terminates (zero o non-zero exit code) is not relevant here.

Warning. The dependencies of TeX Live are a hell: that means you may have to run strelitzia more than once to get all dependencies fully satisfied.

Once your ecosystem is enough for your work, you can go back to using pdflatex main.tex, as you are used.

Usage and options

$ strelitzia [OPTIONS] MAIN.tex

  • The default compiler is pdflatex, but you can change this with --engine ENGINE. Valid alternatives are for example lualatex, xelatex and so on...

  • You may want strelitzia to check whether all the packages required by the current project are installed before attempting the creation of the final document. Use --check-imports PREAMBLE.tex to indicate the file where are the import statements. So far, the program is able to detect the following keywords for mustering packages: \usepackage, \documentclass and \RequirePackage.

  • The selected engine will halt at every error and wait for manual intervention by the user. To ignore and continue, it is sufficient to hit Enter. By default, strelitzia is able to do this for you for up to 50 times. If this number is exceeded, the user has to press the key Enter as many times it will be needed. If you feel this limit is too low (it may be so in case of large projects and a very young TeX Live), you can increase this value with --max-halts NUM.

Warning. In general, always refer to

$ strelitzia --help

because it may happen the latest changes are not properly documented yet.

Installation

This program is written in Haskell, so you need all the machinery to compile the source code: if you do not have it, click! There is a Makefile here, so use it:

# Install strelitzia in ~/.local/bin.
$ make
# Create documentation in ~/.local/bin.
$ make doc
# Uninstall strelitzia.
$ make uninstall

Important. Make sure ~/.local/bin is in your PATH.

Troubleshooting

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