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      <title>Formatting information: Appendix A&nbsp;&#8212; Configuring  search paths</title>
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            <th class="title" width="66%">
               <h1><a name="doctitle">Formatting information</a></h1>
               <h2>A beginner's introduction to typesetting with
                  <span class="LATEX">L<span class="A">A</span><span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span></span></h2>
               <h3>Appendix A&nbsp;&#8212; Configuring  search paths</h3>
               <h3>Peter Flynn</h3>
               <h4>Silmaril Consultants<br>Textual Therapy Division
               </h4><br>v. 3.6 (March 2005)
            </th>
            <td class="toc" width="33%">
               <h4><a name="doctoc">Contents</a></h4>
               <dl>
                  <dd class=""><a href="intro.html#intro">Introduction</a></dd>
                  <dd class=""><a href="foreword.html#foreword">Foreword</a></dd>
                  <dd class=""><a href="preface.html#preface">Preface</a></dd>
               </dl>
               <ol>
                  <li class=""><a href="chapter1.html#get">Installing <span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span> and <span class="LATEX">L<span class="A">A</span><span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span></span></a></li>
                  <li class=""><a href="chapter2.html#plaintext">Using your editor to create documents</a></li>
                  <li class=""><a href="chapter3.html#basic">Basic document structures</a></li>
                  <li class=""><a href="chapter4.html#process">Typesetting, viewing and printing</a></li>
                  <li class=""><a href="chapter5.html#ctan">CTAN, packages, and online help</a></li>
                  <li class=""><a href="chapter6.html#otherdoc">Other document structures</a></li>
                  <li class=""><a href="chapter7.html#texttools">Textual tools</a></li>
                  <li class=""><a href="chapter8.html#typo">Fonts and layouts</a></li>
                  <li class=""><a href="chapter9.html#macros">Programmability (macros)</a></li>
                  <li class=""><a href="chapter10.html#compat">Compatibility with other systems</a></li>
               </ol>
               <ol type="A">
                  <li class="current"><a href="appendixA.html#cnf">Configuring <span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span> search paths</a></li>
                  <li class=""><a href="appendixB.html#tugform"><span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span> Users Group membership</a></li>
                  <li class=""><a href="appendixC.html#asciicharset">The ASCII character set</a></li>
                  <li class=""><a href="appendixD.html#gfdl">GNU Free Documentation License</a></li>
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                  <dd class=""><a href="bibliography.html#biblio">References</a></dd>
                  <dd class=""><a href="index.html#index">Index</a></dd>
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            <td class="credits">
               <p>This edition of <cite>Formatting
                     	  Information</cite> was prompted by the generous help I
                  	have received from <span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span> users too numerous to mention
                  	individually. Shortly after TUGboat published the November
                  	2003 edition, I was reminded by a spate of email of the
                  	fragility of documentation for a system like <span class="LATEX">L<span class="A">A</span><span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span></span> which is
                  	constantly under development. There have been revisions to
                  	packages; issues of new distributions, new tools, and new
                  	interfaces; new books and other new documents; corrections to
                  	my own errors; suggestions for rewording; and in one or two
                  	cases mild abuse for having omitted package X which the author
                  	felt to be indispensable to users. &para;&nbsp;I am grateful as always to the people who sent me
                  	corrections and suggestions for improvement. Please keep them
                  	coming: only this way can this book reflect what people
                  	want to learn. The same limitation still applies, however: no
                  	mathematics, as there are already a dozen or more excellent
                  	books on the market&nbsp;&#8212; as well as other online
                  	documents&nbsp;&#8212; dealing with mathematical typesetting in
                  <span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span> and <span class="LATEX">L<span class="A">A</span><span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span></span> in finer and better detail than I am
                  	capable of. &para;&nbsp;The structure remains the same, but I have revised and
                  	rephrased a lot of material, especially in the earlier
                  	chapters where a new user cannot be expected yet to have
                  	acquired any depth of knowledge. Many of the screenshots have
                  	been updated, and most of the examples and code fragments have
                  	been retested. &para;&nbsp;As I was finishing this edition, I was asked to review
                  	an article for <cite><a href="http://www.tug.org/pracjourn/" name="C3">The Prac<span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span> Journal</a></cite>, which
                  	grew out of the Practical <span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span> Conference in 2004. The
                  	author specifically took the writers of documentation to task
                  	for failing to explain things more clearly, and as I read
                  	more, I found myself agreeing, and resolving to clear up some
                  	specific problems areas as far as possible. It is very
                  	difficult for people who write technical documentation to
                  	remember how they struggled to learn what has now become a
                  	familiar system. So much of what we do is second nature, and a
                  	lot of it actually has nothing to do with the software, but
                  	more with the way in which we view and approach information,
                  	and the general level of knowledge of computing. If I have
                  	obscured something by making unreasonable assumptions about
                  	<em>your</em> knowledge, please let me know so
                  	that I can correct&nbsp;it. 
                  <p>Peter Flynn is author of <cite><a href="bibliography.html#htmlbook" name="C4">The HTML Handbook</a></cite> and <cite><a href="bibliography.html#sgmltools" name="C5">Understanding SGML and XML Tools</a></cite>, and editor of <cite><a href="http://www.ucc.ie/xml/" name="C6">The XML FAQ</a></cite>.
                  </p>
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                  <p>This document is Copyright &copy; 1999&#8211;2005 by
                     Silmaril Consultants under the terms of what is now the GNU
                     Free Documentation License (copyleft).
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                     License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the
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                     license is included in the section entitled <cite><a href="http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/fdl.html" name="C1">The GNU Free Documentation License</a></cite>.
                  </p>
                  <p>You are allowed to distribute, reproduce, and modify it
                     without fee or further requirement for consent subject to the
                     conditions in <a href="appendixD.html#gfdl-4">section D.5</a>. The author has
                     asserted his right to be identified as the author of this
                     document. If you make useful modifications you are asked to
                     inform the author so that the master copy can be updated. See
                     the full text of the License in <a href="appendixD.html#gfdl">Appendix D</a>.
                     
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         <table width="100%">
            <tr>
               <td align="center"><small><i class="chaphead"><b><a name="cnf">APPENDIX</a></b></i></small><br><table border="1">
                     <tr>
                        <td class="chapno">A</td>
                     </tr>
                  </table>
               </td>
               <td><pre class="spacing"></pre></td>
               <td>
                  <p>&nbsp;</p>
                  <h1>Configuring <span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span> search paths
                  </h1>
               </td>
               <td class="toc">
                  <p>&nbsp;</p>
                  <ol></ol>
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               <td align="right"><a href="#doctoc"><img src="top.png" title="Table of Contents" width="32" alt="ToC" align="right" border="0"></a></td>
            </tr>
         </table>
         <p><span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span> systems run on a huge variety of platforms, and are
            typically made up of a large number of rather small files. Some
            computer operating systems have problems with packages like
            this, as their built-in methods for searching for a file when
            needed are poor.
         </p>
         <p>To get around this, <span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span> uses a technique borrowed from the
            Unix world, based on a simple hash index for each directory they
            need to look in. This is known as the ls-R database, from the
            Unix command (<code class="literal">ls -R</code>) which creates it. The
            program which does this for <span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span> is actually called after this
            command: <i><a name="p285">mktexlsr</a></i>, although it may be
            renamed <i><a name="p286">texhash</a></i> or something else on
            your system. This is the program referred to in <a href="chapter5.html#texindex">step 4</a>.
         </p>
         <p>However, to know where to make these indexes, and thus where
            to search, <span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span> needs to be told about them. In a standard
            <span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span> installation this information is in
            <code>texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf</code>. The file is similar
            to a Unix shell script, but the only lines of significance for
            the search paths are the following (this is how they appear in
            the default Unix installation, omitting the comments):
         </p>
         <blockquote><pre>
TEXMFMAIN = /usr/TeX/texmf
TEXMFLOCAL = /usr/TeX/texmf-local
HOMETEXMF = $HOME/texmf
TEXMF = {$HOMETEXMF,!!$TEXMFLOCAL,!!$TEXMFMAIN}
SYSTEXMF = $TEXMF
VARTEXFONTS = /var/lib/texmf
TEXMFDBS = $TEXMF;$VARTEXFONTS
    </pre></blockquote>
         <p>As you can see, this defines where the main <span class="TEX">T<span class="E">E</span>X</span>/METAFONT
            directory is, where the local one is, and where the user's
            personal (home) one is. It then defines the order in which they
            are searched, and makes this the system-wide list. A temporary
            directory for bitmap fonts is set up, and added to the list,
            defining the places in which <i><a name="p287">texhash</a></i>
            or <i><a name="p288">mktexlsr</a></i> creates its
            databases.
         </p>
         <p>In some installations, the local directory is set up in
            <code>/usr/local/share/texmf</code> or
            <code>/usr/share/texmf.local</code> or similar
            variations, so you would substitute this name for
            <code>/usr/TeX/texmf-local</code>. Under Microsoft
            Windows, the names will be full paths such as
            <code>C:\Program Files\TeXLive\texmf</code>. On an Apple
            Mac, it might be <code>Hard
               Disk:TeX:texmf</code>.
         </p>
         <p>If you edit plain-text configuration files with anything
            other than a plain-text editor (e.g.&nbsp;a wordprocessor), or
            if you edit them with a plain-text editor which has been set to
            word-wrap long lines, make sure you turn line-wrapping
            <em>off</em> so that any long lines are preserved in
            their correct format.
         </p>
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