I like to have the ability to run things locally on my computer, but getting LaTeX to work has always been a pain because of the package system. It tells me that I’m missing packages, but they aren’t on the AUR and I’ve never been willing to invest the time to figure out how to install them. But now that I’m working on my thesis I devoted the time to figure it out and I’m posting it here so I don’t forget.
To install LaTeX packages, I first installed tllocalmgr from the AUR:
yay -S tllocalmgr-git
This allowed me to run the tllocalmgr command, which brings up its own prompt. From here, I needed several packages for my thesis:
>>> install biblatex logreq siunitx biblatex-ieee
>>> texhash
The texhash command seems to update some index and needs to be run after installs.
Biber
I also needed to install biber. It’s available for arch, but out-of-date, so I built it from source. I needed to install perl pp (sudo pacman -S perl-par-packer) and then I could run perl Build.PL in the biber project source folder. This generated an executable file called Build and I ran ./Build installdeps. Once this finished, I ran ./Build and then sudo ./Build install to finish installing biber. I was then able to resolve the bibliography error messages from Texmaker by cd’ing into the thesis directory and running biber thesis