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I have just installed BasicTeX on OSX 10.5 and I'm trying to locate the texmf directory to copy the llncs (LaTeX .cls and .sty files) folder into. According to the install log the location should be ~/Library/texmf, but this folder does not exist.

So where are the packages stored on OSX?

Background: the llncs package is not in the usual repositories so it cannot be installed with any of the package-management tools. On the Windows machine at work I use MikTeX and installed the package manually by copying it to the texmf directory and updating the DB as explained in How can I manually install a package on MiKTeX (Windows).

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    The directory is not created as the installer doesn't touch users' homes. Just create it: open your home Library folder and hit the "New folder" menu entry, naming the new folder texmf.
    – egreg
    Jun 2, 2012 at 13:23
  • I created the texmf directory and put the package there, but latex can't find it.
    – Ivana
    Jun 2, 2012 at 23:26
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    You have to create the entire path ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/llncs, that is, a folder llncs inside latex inside tex inside texmf, and finally put the llncs.cls file in the last folder. There's nothing else to do.
    – egreg
    Jun 2, 2012 at 23:29
  • Thank you! It works like charm. Meta: can i mark comment as an answer somehow?
    – Ivana
    Jun 4, 2012 at 8:16
  • Is this still correct? I am running BasicTex 2020 on 10.15 and would like to do this with enumitem and hyphenat. To my knowledge, these do not come with the small distribution
    – Chris
    Nov 19, 2020 at 17:01

1 Answer 1

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The "personal tree" on Mac OS X is rooted in the Library folder for each user. However the installer doesn't touch the users' home directories, so the

~/Library/texmf

folder has to be created. Inside it one has to rebuild the usual TDS structure, so llncs.cls should go into

~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/llncs

and all folders must be created manually. So, open Library in your folder, create texmf, open it, create tex, open it, create latex, open it, create llncs and finally put llncs.cls in the last created folder.

This is necessary in order that the TeX programs can correctly find the file.

Note that no "hashing" operation needs to be performed: the "personal tree" is always searched, since it's assumed not to be very big.

On GNU/Linux systems one should omit the "Library" level.

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