The Fugue

I recently had need to put a .bst file in my LaTeX search path. This turned out to be difficult to search for. I found a lot of pages and style files telling users to put such and such file in their LaTeX search path. I began to wonder if I was the only LaTeX user on earth who had no idea what the LaTeX search path was.

With some effort I found that the global path’s root is usually something like /usr/share/texmf. I’m not interested in putting it in the global path though. We have home directories for a reason here.

Finally I found the answer, with some creative googling. The answer depends on your distribution/OS. Apparently on Debian it’s ~/.texmf-config (untested). The MacTeX distribution (which I have installed) looks in ~/Library/texmf. The macports build (don’t ask) looks in ~/texmf, which I learned only by trial and error. My guess is that latter answer is the answer if you build by yourself, and so might be a good initial guess no matter what the distribution.

So, I did this:

mkdir -p ~/Library/texmf/bibtex/bst
ln -s ~/Library/texmf ~/texmf
mv acm-annotated.bst ~/texmf/bibtex/bst