Guix provides packages for the TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt, LuaTeX, and related typesetting systems, taken from the TeX Live distribution. However, because TeX Live is so huge and because finding your way in this maze is tricky, we thought that you, dear user, would welcome guidance on how to deploy the relevant packages so you can compile your TeX and LaTeX documents.
TeX Live currently comes in two flavors in Guix:
texlive package: it comes with every single
TeX Live package (more than 7,000 of them), but it is huge (more than
4 GiB for a single package!).
texlive- packages: you install texlive-base,
which provides core functionality and the main
commands—pdflatex, dvips, luatex,
mf, etc.—together with individual packages that provide just the
features you need—texlive-listings for the listings package,
texlive-hyperref for hyperref, texlive-beamer for
Beamer, texlive-pgf for PGF/TikZ, and so on.
We recommend using the modular package set because it is much less resource-hungry. To build your documents, you would use commands such as:
guix shell texlive-base texlive-wrapfig \ texlive-hyperref texlive-cm-super -- pdflatex doc.tex
You can quickly end up with unreasonably long command lines though. The solution is to instead write a manifest, for example like this one:
(specifications->manifest
'("rubber"
"texlive-base"
"texlive-wrapfig"
"texlive-microtype"
"texlive-listings" "texlive-hyperref"
;; PGF/TikZ
"texlive-pgf"
;; Additional fonts.
"texlive-cm-super" "texlive-amsfonts"
"texlive-times" "texlive-helvetic" "texlive-courier"))
You can then pass it to any command with the -m option:
guix shell -m manifest.scm -- pdflatex doc.tex
See 书写清单, for more on manifests. In the future, we plan to
provide packages for TeX Live collections—“meta-packages” such
as fontsrecommended, humanities, or langarabic that
provide the set of packages needed in this particular domain. That will
allow you to list fewer packages.
The main difficulty here is that using the modular package set forces you to
select precisely the packages that you need. You can use guix
search, but finding the right package can prove to be tedious. When a
package is missing, pdflatex and similar commands fail with an
obscure message along the lines of:
doc.tex: File `tikz.sty' not found. doc.tex:7: Emergency stop.
or, for a missing font:
kpathsea: Running mktexmf phvr7t ! I can't find file `phvr7t'.
How do you determine what the missing package is? In the first case, you’ll find the answer by running:
$ guix search texlive tikz name: texlive-pgf version: 59745 …
In the second case, guix search turns up nothing. Instead, you
can search the TeX Live package database using the tlmgr
command:
$ guix shell texlive-base -- tlmgr info phvr7t
tlmgr: cannot find package phvr7t, searching for other matches:
Packages containing `phvr7t' in their title/description:
Packages containing files matching `phvr7t':
helvetic:
texmf-dist/fonts/tfm/adobe/helvetic/phvr7t.tfm
texmf-dist/fonts/tfm/adobe/helvetic/phvr7tn.tfm
texmf-dist/fonts/vf/adobe/helvetic/phvr7t.vf
texmf-dist/fonts/vf/adobe/helvetic/phvr7tn.vf
tex4ht:
texmf-dist/tex4ht/ht-fonts/alias/adobe/helvetic/phvr7t.htf
The file is available in the TeX Live helvetic package, which is
known in Guix as texlive-helvetic. Quite a ride, but we found it!
There is one important limitation though: Guix currently provides a subset
of the TeX Live packages. If you stumble upon a missing package, you can
try and import it (see Invoking guix import):
guix import texlive package
Additional options include:
--recursive-rTraverse the dependency graph of the given upstream package recursively and generate package expressions for all those packages that are not yet in Guix.
注: TeX Live packaging is still very much work in progress, but you can help! See 贡献, for more information.