Script to download TeX Live Packages "on the fly"
Original written by Saitulaa Naranong
Download of the last version by Saitulaa Naranong v1.2
From the original thread http://latex-community.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=15194
From reading the forums and groups, I gather that a lot of us miss the "download on the fly" feature offered by MiKTeX. I've written a script that should allow us to do just that. Make sure you have python (most OS X and linux distributions provide it by default; if not, you can get either the 2 or 3 version from here), then run the command
texliveonfly.py [options] file.tex
or, for python 3,
python3 texliveonfly.py [options] file.tex
instead of "lualatex" or "pdflatex".
The current options are:
Options:
--version show program version number and exit
-h, --help print this help text and exit
-c COMPILER, --compiler=COMPILER
your LaTeX compiler; defaults to pdflatex
-a ARGS, --arguments=ARGS
arguments to pass to compiler; default is: "-synctex=1
-interaction=nonstopmode"
--texlive_bin=LOCATION
Custom location for the TeX Live bin folder
--terminal_only Forces us to assume we can run only in this terminal.
Permission escalators will appear here rather than
graphically or in a new terminal.
-s OPTION, --speech_when=OPTION
Toggles speech-synthesized notifications (where
supported). OPTION can be "always", "never",
"installing", "failed", or some combination.
-f, --fail_silently If tlmgr cannot be found, compile document anyway.
Setting this command within your favourite editor will allow you to download packages on the fly. The script defaults to PdfLaTeX with arguments '-synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode'.
As of the Sep 27 version, the script should be compatible with either python 2 or 3. It depends strongly on the TeX Live Package Manager (tlmgr), so please make sure you are using at least TeX Live 2010. It should resolve all missing included packages and a fair number of missing fonts. It was written on Ubuntu 10.04 and should work on all Linux systems; the Sep 26th version should also work on OS X (but hasn't been tested as of this posting).
Any comments, suggestions, or bug reports are appreciated, and I hope you enjoy.