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Building a Latex Environment With Basictex on Macos

LaTeX is a popular typesetting system, especially useful in academia. For macOS users, BasicTeX offers a lightweight alternative to the full MacTeX distribution.

What is BasicTeX?

BasicTeX is a minimal version of MacTeX. It’s only 80 MB compared to several GBs of MacTeX, including just the core TeX command-line tools.

Install BasicTeX

Use Homebrew to install BasicTeX:

brew install --cask basictex

Install local::lib

The local::lib is a Perl module that creates a locally installed perl module library.

cpan install local::lib

Add Perl to PATH

In order to use the local::lib module, you need to add Perl to your PATH. You can do this by adding the following lines to your shell profile (~/.zshrc):

echo 'eval "$(perl -I$HOME/perl5/lib/perl5 -Mlocal::lib)"' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

After this, you should be able to use your locally installed Perl modules.

Update All Built-In TeX Packages

Keeping your TeX packages up to date is crucial for maintaining compatibility and receiving the latest features and bug fixes. You can update all built-in TeX packages using the TeX Live Manager (tlmgr):

sudo tlmgr update --self --all

Additional Tools for LaTeX

Install Latexpand

Latexpand is a useful tool for LaTeX users. It helps in flattening a LaTeX document by expanding \input and \include commands, which is useful for submission to journals that require a single .tex file.

To install Latexpand via tlmgr:

sudo tlmgr install latexpan

Install Latexdiff

Latexdiff is a program that compares two LaTeX files and marks up significant differences between them (similar to the diff utility but specialized for LaTeX). It is a useful tool for version control and for reviewing changes in LaTeX documents.

To install Latexdiff using Homebrew:

brew install latexdiff

Example Usage

The following example demonstrates how to use Latexpand and Latexdiff to compare two versions of a LaTeX document:

  1. First, use Latexpand to flatten each version of the document:
latexpand --expand-bbl draft.bbl draft.tex -o draft-bbl.tex 
latexpand --expand-bbl revision.bbl revision.tex -o revision-bbl.tex
  1. Then, use Latexdiff to generate a diff file highlighting the changes:
latexdiff draft-bbl.tex revision-bbl.tex > diff.tex

This diff.tex file will visually show the differences between the two versions, which can be compiled to PDF for an easier review process.