[Tex/LaTex] find LaTeX and its package installation guide in details

booksdocumentationlinuxpdftextexlive

After some days when my university will be closed for vacation of Eid al-Fitr I will go to my village (InshaAllah).

I have decided to learn LaTeX in the vacation. But in my village there is no Internet connection. So, if I will fail to install any package in that time I can not take help from Internet. For this, I am downloading all packages that may be needed.

And I also need some manuals/books/documents about package installation, so that if I will fail to install any package I can overcome it by reading the documents.

Which books/manuals/documents you recommend me for taking with me?

No problem if the document's size is high.

I have Ubuntu 14.04 and fedora 25 as OS and I use TeX Live.

Best Answer

The full TeXLive installation comes with the documentation of its packages, usually under the path /usr/local/texlive/2016/tex-dist/doc/.

The full installation takes about 4Gb, and is easiest done via the install-tl script that can be found here. More information how to install in this way can be found in this related question

In the documentation you can find various helpful LaTeX introductions, such as

  • firstlatexdoc which shows you to get your first document
  • lshort which gives you a very good introduction into various aspects
  • latex4wp which has a focus on word processor users
  • latexcheat a cheat sheet overview
  • l2tabu an overview of bad practices
  • latex-doc-ptr an overview where to find more information
  • latex2e-help-texinfo the (un-)official reference manual
  • comprehensive an overview of an abundance of symbols and commands
  • …

You can directly load the corresponding pdf of the documentation by typing e.g. texdoc lshort on the command line.

Furthermore, as these documentation documents include their .tex sources, you can even search the documentation via grep, or using the following script.

You can find more information concerning references and documentation on the TeX Users Group web site or their links to further documentation, where you can also find recommendations for books and where you can download numerous resources.

Also have a look at the related question for more information, where you can find numerous links to pdf-files and Ebooks available for download:

Another good resource is the TeX Catalogue, which I prefer in the form of a Topical Index. Here you can also find a list of packages that might be interesting for your purpose, eg. for Computer science. It might be sufficient to just download or even print this list, as you need only the package names to find them in the documentation tree of TeXLive.

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