Installing lsst-texmf

There are three ways to install and use lsst-texmf: as a single centralized installation on your computer, as a submodule of individual document Git repositories, and as a Docker container. This page describes how to install lsst-texmf centrally. See Using lsst-texmf as a Git submodule and Using lsst-texmf with Docker for the other approaches.

To install lsst-texmf, clone the lsst-texmf repository:

git clone https://github.com/lsst/lsst-texmf

To enable LaTeX to find the style files the TEXMFHOME environment variable can be set to the texmf subdirectory. For example, the following can be used if you are in the directory from which you cloned the repository:

export TEXMFHOME=`pwd`/lsst-texmf/texmf

If you do not want to override this environment setting but wish to have the files always available you can move the entire texmf tree to the default home location which can be found using:

kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFHOME

On a Mac this is ~/Library/texmf.

Once this environment variable is set, xelatex and pdflatex will find the relevant files automatically.

Note

xelatex is the modern version of pdflatex that has support for more modern native fonts and Unicode. The lsstdoc.cls class and the LSST-beamer.sty adjust correctly when xelatex is being used. More information on xelatex can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX. Consider using xelatex for all documents. Use the -xelatex option for the latexmk command, rather than -pdf.