How to: LaTeX Beamer for TeX Live on OS X

Published June 2, 2008

Here you'll find instructions to install LaTeX Beamer on a TeX Live system, which was installed via MacPorts (but should also work on other installations if you adjust the TEXMF path).

If you don't want to follow the whole instruction, be sure to check out the Bash script, which installs LaTeX Beamer for you, at the end of this post.

Installation

First we need to download LaTeX Beamer and it's required dependencies (xcolor and pgf). The files can be downloaded on the corresponding website at SourceForge or via these direct links:

Upon completion of the download the files need to be extracted:

tar xvzf latex-beamer-3.07.tar.gz
tar xzvf xcolor-2.00.tar.gz
tar xvzf pgf-1.01.tar.gz

The TeX directory structure has a specific hierarchy (the TEXMF tree) and various locations where it looks for its files. The default TEXMF tree on a MacPorts TeX Live installation is located at /opt/local/share/texmf/.

To make use of the packages, we need to create the appropriate directories in the TEXMF tree, and place the previously extracted files there:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/{beamer,pgf,xcolor}

sudo mv latex-beamer-3.07/* /opt/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/beamer/
sudo mv pgf-1.01/* /opt/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/pgf/
sudo mv xcolor/* /opt/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/xcolor/

TeX does not recognize these new files right away since it uses a cache (the ls-R database) for efficiency reasons. The following command rebuilds the ls-R database:

sudo texhash

Testing

We can copy&paste the example from the LaTeX Beamer website into a newly created file and compile it in order to test the installation:

pdflatex filename.tex

This should, among various other file formats, create the presentation in the pdf format (filename.pdf).

Bash script

Following a installation instruction step-by-step can be a very time-consuming task. But since I'm a huge fan of automating tasks, I wrote a small Bash script which basically performs all the steps mentioned above. (Note: You'll need to have wget installed.)

Download the Bash script here.

Don't forget to make the file executeable:

chmod u+x latexbeamer_texlive.sh

That's it. I hope the Bash script will be useful for some people.

For further information on the TeX system, I recommend reading Managing a one-person TeX system.