I've just installed texlive
on Ubuntu 16.04. In my system and in online resources, I keep seeing references to texmf
, but I can't figure out what it is.
- Web search and tex.stackexchage.com search for "What is texmf?" don't turn up a definition
- It appears frequently on the main page of the texlive docs, but without any definition that I can find
- "texmf" doesn't appear anywhere in the Things with 'TeX' in the name page
- "texmf" doesn't appear anywhere on the TeX FAQ page
- It has no
man
page - "texmf" doesn't appear anywhere on the TeX Wikipedia page
What is it and why do I keep seeing it as if I'm supposed to know what it is?
Edit: After poking around a bit, I've found the standard TeX Directory Structure at /usr/share/texlive/
and /usr/share/texmf/
on Ubuntu 16.04. The information given in the accepted answer refers to these if you're on that system and installed TeX via apt-get install texlive-latex-base
.
Best Answer
texmf
roughly corresponds the name of the top-level directory within a TeX Distribution.texmf
stands for TeX and Metafont. Eachtexmf
directory follows the TeX Directory Structure (TDS) scheme.For example, a TeX Live system is organized in the following way (on Mac/Linux). There is a
texmf-local
folder, and a folder for each installed year (here 2017).Within the 2017 folder there are a number of different
texmf-...
folders:Each of these shares the same organizational structure, (TDS), but they contain different things.
texmf-dist
contains all of the packages of the distribution.texmf-config
contains configuration files, andtexmf-var
contains various other system wide files (e.g. hyphenation patterns).If we look at
texmf-dist
it follows the TDS scheme and contains the following directories:This provides a set of known directories for TeX and related programs to find things. It is designed to be cross-platform, so that all TeX Live systems will in principle have the same layout.
Furthermore, this directory structure is also used in the
texmf-local
folder (for machine-wide local additions), and also in the user leveltexmf
folder. See e.g.