Setup LaTeX environment

After a reinstallation of ubuntu in last month, the original installation of texlive 2015 was gone. As the 2016 release of texlive is already available to use, I decided to install the newer version on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. This post records the steps of installation as well as some other configurations to several dedicated components.

Configure package source for backported packages

The package repository of Ubuntu provides the full collection of texlive. However, the package are never updated to a newer release after the specific Ubuntu version is released. To use a more recent release of texlive, some other sources are required. A PPA created by jonathonf is available to get the texlive 2016 installed from package manager on LTS version of Ubuntu.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/texlive-2016
sudo apt-get update

# the total package size of this full meta package 
# is more than 2 GiB.
# install `texlive' package for the core packages
sudo apt-get install texlive-full

# waiting the installation process to finish
# retry if some packages are filed to download

Since this is a backported package, the original version in ubuntu repository can be found at Yakkety repository (Ubuntu 16.10). Refer to texlive-base.

Configure an environment for editing

When composing document with latex, most of things are done within a text editor. Some plugins to the text editor can provide various of assists. My favorite environment for editing latex is Sublime Text with the LaTeXTools package.

The installation of LaTeXTools is just the same as other Sublime Text packages. Either copying the package file to user configuration folder or manage the package of plugins via Package Control is supported.

To preview the generated pdf document from the source of document, the recommended viewer in Linux is evince, which can be synchronized with the current position of editing cursor.

To improve the compatibility of compiling, a common practice is add magic comments at the beginning of document to specifying some requirement of this document. The following codes provide some hints to the compiling environment about the engine to use and the options for the compiling engine. These magic comments should be placed at the initial of a document.

%!TEX program = xelatex
%!TEX option = -shell-escape -8bit

Add common fonts to system

When composing a document with some personal styles, the customization of font is always a must. Since most of font available online are in the format of ttf or otf. To use them within document, a simple approach is install the font to system and then importing them by their canonical name packaged with the font file.

To install font in Linux, I prefer the approach to copy them to a user specific folder and update the system font cache. The standard locations for system font in Linux include /usr/share/fonts, /usr/local/share/fonts, and ~/.fonts, which can be configured via /etc/fonts/fonts.conf. For personal usage, just copy font files to the last folder. After the preparation of disk files, an extra step is required to active these font, which is to refresh the font cache by invoking the fc-cache command.

To use system font in latex document, first include the fontspec package, then define the font name of different document component accordingly. The following code snippet reset the main font to Times New Roman, and the monospace font (for source code) to Monaco.

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Times New Roman}
\setmonofont{Monaco}

Configure Pygments for code block

To test the status of the configuration, I tried to compile some documents edited before. However, some document failed to compile out of the lack of the Pygments python package which is used to highlight code section with in a document.

Since Pygments is a python package, it is recommended to manage them via the pip package management. The following commands on ubuntu ensure the pip to be configured. (The package to be installed is for python 2, while another package named python3-pip is available in repository for python 3.)

# install package
sudo apt-get install python-pip

# upgrade pip itself
sudo -H pip install --upgrade pip

Then install Pygments with pip:

sudo -H pip install pygments

With pygmentize command in path, some macro package in TexLive can highlight program code in document in the style of Pygments. For example, the folloing code use minted macro to render a section of code with syntax highlighted:

\begin{minted}[autogobble, obeytabs, resetmargins, fontsize=\footnotesize]{shell}
  make
  make test
  make install
\end{minted}