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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.

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  • 6
    when you install LaTeX the package documentations should be installed, too. You can access them from the command line with the texdoc command. For example texdoc tikz.
    – jakun
    May 3, 2017 at 6:42
  • 3
    Maybe you could provide some more information what aspects of LaTeX you want to learn, or which field your studies are in, such that we can provide further information for useful resources.
    – jjdb
    May 3, 2017 at 7:50
  • Ah, and by the way: Welcome to TeX.SX
    – jjdb
    May 3, 2017 at 10:27
  • @jjdb, are you wanting to know about my subject? My subject is CSE.
    – alhelal
    May 3, 2017 at 11:41
  • Sorry, CSE says nothing to me. Could you maybe orient on the standard categories of science (if it applies), or at least the broad categories one uses in SE? Or try some other general description in what context you want to use LaTeX?
    – jjdb
    May 3, 2017 at 11:53

3 Answers 3

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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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  • I installed TeXLive from tug.org and also got the documentation for each package about 2694 package.
    – alhelal
    May 7, 2017 at 10:09
  • is it possible to add extra documentation in the same directory when I will install new packages?
    – alhelal
    May 7, 2017 at 10:11
  • @BandaMuhammadAlHelal Yes, of course. But it's best you use tlmgr to install new packages. You can look up the list of all available packages by typing tlmgr list | more in the command line, and install a not-installed package (without an 'i' in front; I chose boldtensors) by tlmgr install boldtensors (maybe add a sudo in front), et voilà, the documentation for boldtensors is there. Removing the package, tlmgr remove boldtensors removes the package and also the documentation. tlmgr is a really nice tool, however I didn't find a question here promoting its pros. I'll add one
    – jjdb
    May 8, 2017 at 7:23
  • are all CTAN packages available in tlmgr?
    – alhelal
    May 8, 2017 at 9:57
  • @BandaMuhammadAlHelal Actually, as far as I understand it, tlmgr draws its installation files from a specific CTAN mirror. You can see the repositories currently used by tlmgr repository list
    – jjdb
    May 8, 2017 at 11:32
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=================

For windows

=================

https://miktex.org/howto/install-miktex

                or

https://www.tug.org/texlive/windows.html

=================

For Linux

=================

https://www.tug.org/texlive/acquire-netinstall.html

==================

Complete LaTeX package both Windows and Linux

==================

http://ctan.math.washington.edu/tex-archive/systems/texlive/Images/texlive2016.iso

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  • I would suggest you to download texlive-2016 huge iso which does not require internet connection to install latex packages, 1). Install Texlive -2016, 2). Install any latex Editor eg. Texmaker, winedit, texstudio etc.
    – Biki Teron
    May 3, 2017 at 13:46
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In Ubuntu: type Ctrl-Alt-T to get a command line. Type sudo apt-get install texlive-full to get a complete tex installation. This includes documentation using the command line command texdoc. You might like to have some books on TeX as well, for example Knuth's The TeXbook.

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    I would not recommend installing from the OS repository via apt-get or similar tools, as these might not be shipping out the current version of TeXLive. Also, the keyboard shortcut you've mentioned depends on the window manager, and it might be specific to Gnome (probably).
    – jjdb
    May 3, 2017 at 8:11
  • See for the downsides of OS package manager installation
    – jjdb
    May 3, 2017 at 8:17

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