TinyTex
I have had ongoing problems using biber
bookdown
and laxtex
to produce PDFs. So, I decided to throw out the package texlive-full
and start again. That didn't work and I uninstalled it again and went looking for an alternative.
I knew that Yihui Xie had produced a distribution of LaTex called TinyTex. So I thought I'd give it a go.
Well that was journey. Here are some notes for anyone else trying to get this excellent looking package to work under FreeBSD 11.1
First, deinstalling texlive-full
(the FreeBSD package) leaves traces all over the system. It's messy to find the bits. In the end I had to search the ~/.TinyTex
tree and delete anything on the rest of the system that matched names (crude but effective).
Secondly, during installation I got a number of errors, e.g.,
fmtutil: running `xetex -ini -jobname=xetex -progname=xetex -etex xetex.ini' ... Shared object "libfreetype.so.9" not found, required by "xetex"
On this particular installation, l have:
/usr/local/lib/libfreetype.so
/usr/local/lib/libfreetype.so.6
So I cheated and linked libfreetype.so to libfreetype.so.9. That allowed the package to install cleanly.
Finally, to bookdown
to compile to a PDF (the whole point of the exercise)
I kept on getting errors about biblatex
not finding apa (my referencing style of choice/necessity). Because I erroneously believed it was installed, it took forever for me to figure out I need to do:
tlmgr install biblatex-apa
and then, being British, it was easy to do
tlmgr install babel-english
And now it all seems to work. That said, I've not tried producing any PDFs from the other .tex and .md files I have laying around.