TeXFindPkg tool for querying or installing TeX packages

Description: Query or Install TeX packages and their dependencies
Copyright: 2023 (c) Jianrui Lyu <tolvjr@163.com>
Repository: https://github.com/lvjr/texfindpkg
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

1. Introduction

TeXFindPkg makes it easy to query or install TeX packages and their dependencies by file names, command names or environment names. It supports both TeXLive and MiKTeX distributions. At present it focuses mainly on LaTeX packages, but may extend to ConTeXt packages if anyone would like to contribute.

2. Installation

Normally your TeX distribution will copy TeXFindPkg files and create a binary file texfindpkg when you install this package. If a manual installation is needed, you could copy TeXFindPkg files to TEXMF tree as follows:

Package file	Where to install it
texfindpkg.1	TEXMF/doc/man/man1/texfindpkg.1
README.md	TEXMF/doc/support/texfindpkg/README.md
texfindpkg.lua	TEXMF/scripts/texfindpkg/texfindpkg.lua
texfindpkg.json.gz	TEXMF/scripts/texfindpkg/texfindpkg.json.gz
tfpbuild.lua	TEXMF/source/texfindpkg/tfpbuild.lua

Then you could create a symbolic link from /usr/local/bin/texfindpkg to path/to/texfindpkg.lua on Linux or MacOS, or create a batch file texfindpkg.bat in binary folder of the TeX distribution with these lines on Windows:

@echo off
texlua path\to\texfindpkg.lua %*

3. Usage

After installing TeXFindPkg, you can run it by executing

texfindpkg <action> [<option>] [<name>]

The <action> could be query, install, help or version. The leading dashes in any <action> will be removed first.

For query action, you pass -f, -c or -e as <option> to indicate the following <name> is a file name, command name or environment name. For example,

• texfindpkg query -f array.sty means querying package with file array.sty;
• texfindpkg query -c fakeverb means querying package with command \fakeverb;
• texfindpkg query -e frame means querying package with environment {frame}.

The only difference between query and install actions is that with install action TeXFindPkg will install missing TeXLive or MiKTeX packages at the end.

With help action, TeXFindPkg prints help message and exit. With version action, TeXFindPkg prints version information and exit.

4. Building

TeXFindPkg uses completion files of TeXstudio editor which are in completion folder of TeXstudio repository.

After putting completion folder into current folder, you can execute texlua tfpbuild.lua generate to generate texfindpkg.json and texfindpkg.json.gz files.

5. Contributing

Any updates of dependencies, commands or environments for packages should be contributed directly to TeXstudio project.