This guide describes how to install and work with the LaTeX typesetting system.
Ubuntu 12.04
References:
On Ubuntu 12.04, there is a PPA available with a recent version of the most popular LaTeX distribution, TeX Live: eX Live Backports PPA. This PPA is needed as the version of TeX Live in the standard Ubuntu 12.04 repositories is over two years old (the 2009 release versus the 2012 one). Bug #712521 details the efforts being made to improve this situation in the standard repositories. In the mean time, the PPA can be installed as follows:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:texlive-backports
$ sudo apt-get update
Once the PPA is installed, the LaTeX packages should be installed (FYI: this will take quite a while, as the install is about 3GB in size):
$ sudo apt-get install texlive-full
The following command will build PDFs for any .tex files in the current directory:
$ latexmk -gg -pdfps