Bits of Learning

Learning sometimes happens in big jumps, but mostly in little tiny steps. I share my baby steps of learning here, mostly on topics around programming, programming languages, software engineering, and computing in general. But occasionally, even on other disciplines of engineering or even science. I mostly learn through examples and doing. And this place is a logbook of my experiences in learning something. You may find several things interesting here: little cute snippets of (hopefully useful) code, a bit of backing theory, and a lot of gyan on how learning can be so much fun.

Saturday, February 25, 2006

Installing beamer

The beamer class for making stylish latex presentations is available here. Once the tar.gz file is downloaded and untarred. In the doc/ directory, the beameruserguide.pdf describes in detail the installation process. The salient points are reproduced here:

Switch user to root.
In the texmf directory (in my case it was /usr/share/texmf/)(and let's call it $(texmfdir), find directory tex/.
in tex/, find directory latex/. If it's not there create it.
cd latex/
mkdir beamer/
mkdir xcolor/
mkdir pgf/

Copy all files in the beamer directory (created on untarring the tarball) to:
$(texmfdir)/tex/latex/beamer.

Find pgf package on your machine. If it is not there, download from here.

Untar:
tar -xvzf pgf-1.00.tar.gz

Switch user to root.
Copy all files in the pgf-1.00 to $(texmfdir)/tex/latex/pgf/

Similarly download the xcolor package from here.

Unzip:
unzip xcolor.zip
cd xcolor/

As per the installation instructions found in README, do the following:
latex xcolor.ins

Switch user to root.
cp *.sty $(texmfdir)/tex/latex/xcolor/
cp *.def $(texmfdir)/tex/latex/xcolor/
mkdir $(texmfdir)/dvips/xcolor
cp *.pro $(texmfdir)/dvips/xcolor

Finally update the tex database by:
texhash

That's it. You should be ready to go!

4 comments:

MB -- Maths Blogger said...
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MB -- Maths Blogger said...
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MB -- Maths Blogger said...

Hi,
I have some trouble finding the file "texmf", I looked everywhere but I don't find it.
any help will be very much appreciated.
Thx

Dominik said...

Just a random comment: if one is not sure whether beamer is installed or not, try:
kpsewhich beamer.cls

If you are not sure where to copy the beamer files (e.g. where is texmf root) try kpsewhich on some file that is installed for sure