quartz/content/Projects/latex.md

title	tags	date	lastmod	draft
A Working Latex Install that Doesn't Suck	linux difficulty-easy programming writing	2024-08-15	2024-08-15	false

\LaTeX is a programming language and environment well-suited to academic writing (and it can be embedded in Quartz, too!). There are many different ways to use it in your work. The absolute easiest will be Overleaf, an online collaborative editor with many document templates and all common packages available. But for more specific use cases, or offline work, a latex "distribution" can be installed on your computer for you to manage your own packages.

Now, system packages are seamless install-wise, but for latex distros specifically, they can be hard to navigate, especially on a distro like Arch which has rearranged its latex packages. Below is my guide for a no-frills, opinionated, "I want to use LaTeX" installation, complete with explanations for all the choices along the way.

TLDR

$ sudo pacman --needed -S texlive-basic texlive-bin texlive-binextra texlive-bibtexextra texlive-latex texlive-latexrecommended okular neovim
$ nvim afile.tex
$ pdflatex afile.tex

SETUP

$ sudo pacman -Qsq ".*texlive.*|.*latex.*" # List all installed packages matching the regex
texlive-basic
texlive-bibtexextra
texlive-bin
texlive-binextra
texlive-latex
texlive-latexrecommended
$

Installing all of the above will allow you to create .tex files and compile them to various outputs (PDF, HTML) with latex file.tex or pdflatex file.tex.

Install texstudio for a seamlessly integrated editor. Otherwise, read on for an Programs I Like/code-editors#Neovim configuration recipe.

If you're like me and like to modify where a program stores things to comport with the XDG basedir spec, please review the table of environment variables on the archwiki.

Editor

VimTeX is a great plugin supporting live view, inverse search, and more. Lazy config:

{
	"lervag/vimtex",
	lazy = false,
	init = function()
		vim.g.vimtex_view_method = "general"
	end,
},

It also requires global variables to be set up correctly for its features:

-- Your nvim distro may have a native way to set globals, may also be done with vimscript
-- Modify both lines as needed for your chosen viewer
vim.g.vimtex_view_general_viewer = "okular"
vim.g.vimtex_view_general_options = "--unique file:@pdf#src:@line@tex" -- Goes in Okular -> Options -> Configure Okular -> Editor -> Custom -> command

Explanation of packages

First off, I use TeXlive over MikTeX for security and feature reasons. I recommend pdflatex because of the comparison by Overleaf. And Okular is a fairly feature-packed but still performant pdf viewer/annotator, pretty common over Vimtex's other supported alternatives like Zathura and muPDF.

Certain packages house the basic commands used to configure your install or generate files. Use sudo pacman -F $(which someprogram) to learn which package installs a specific command. Those are:

texlive-basic
texlive-bin
texlive-binextra

The TeX packages needed to generate most files are housed in other arch packages. You can find which CPAN is in which arch package with tlmgr info thepackagename | grep collection. It'll return collection-somename, which means that you need to install texlive-somename with pacman. I needed to install all these to resolve warnings and errors:

texlive-bibtexextra
texlive-latex
texlive-latexrecommended

Hope that helps!