How to discover what TeXLive ports I need

[list_email at icloud.com]

On May 19, 2016, at 3:23 AM, Mojca Miklavec <mojca at macports.org> wrote:

> On 19 May 2016 at 12:06,  <list_email at icloud.com> wrote:
>> I'm trying to make a functional replacement for TeXLive 2013 provided by MacTeX http://tug.org/mactex/, using MacPorts, and reaching some level of frustration with figuring out what MacPorts stuff I need. I did
>> 
>> sudo port install texlive +medium
>> 
>> But now, for example, a long-worked-on LyX project now fails to compile, complaining of
>> 
>> LaTeX Error: File `prettyref.sty' not found.
> 
> This one is in texlive-latex-extra.
> 
>> Ditto for flushend and who knows what else will pop up. I went through the various port descriptions at macports.org that contain texlive in their names and get a very limited amount of information such as
>> 
>> name                texlive-latex-extra
>> ...
>> description         TeX Live: LaTeX additional packages
>> long_description    A very large collection of add-on packages for LaTeX
>> 
>> That's it. Is there some way to figure out what ports I need to add to get specific functionality? Or will I have to bite the bullet and do sudo port install texlive +full which warns "Full installation scheme (very large!)".
> 
> If you want a full replacement of MacTeX, you need to do the full
> installation of TeX Live. I no longer have version 2013 installed, but
> MacTeX 2016 is 5 GB (minus epsilon). You cannot get any thinner
> installation by getting the full installation scheme from MacPorts
> except that you wouldn't be installing PPC and 32-bit Intel binaries.
> 
> If you merely want to compile your documents and want to discover
> which packages are needed, we really should set up some service to
> list the files in the packages, but at the moment most likely the
> easiest way is to do a checkout of
>    svn://tug.org/texlive/trunk/Master/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb
> 
> And search for that file. You can find it in package "prettyref":
> 
> name prettyref
> category Package
> revision 15878
> ...
> runfiles size=1
> texmf-dist/tex/latex/prettyref/prettyref.sty
> 
> 
> and the package prettyref is in colection "latexextra":
> 
> name collection-latexextra
> category Collection
> revision 40214
> ...
> depend pressrelease
> depend prettyref
> depend preview
> 
> And then you know which package to install. I agree that this is
> pretty annoying though, but I don't see any better solution at the
> moment (other than perhaps installing MikTeX; last time I tried it
> failed to compile on OS X though).
> 
> Mojca

Thanks, Mojca. I notice that my /usr/local/texlive/2013 is 3.4 GB so I should be able to delete that in due course. I'll look into the svn link and most likely install +full. I also notice from some saved e-mails that you've helped me a lot before. 8^)

Jerry