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Install TeXLive in WSL2 Using VSCode as Editor and configuring support for Chinese

  • Sep 11, 2021

Install TeXLive in WSL2

Check out the official quick installation instructions.

Pre-install

# download installation file
wget https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz
# unzip
tar -xzvf install-tl-unx.tar.gz

Install

cd install-tl-20210907
sudo ./install-tl

Setting PATH

Open ~/.bashrc, add the following command to the file

export PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2021/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH

Testing

Type the following command

latex small2e

and you should see something like this

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-1.40.23 (TeX Live 2021) (preloaded format=latex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/small2e.tex
LaTeX2e <2021-06-01> patch level 1
L3 programming layer <2021-08-27>
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2021/02/12 v1.4n Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3backend/l3backend-dvips.def)
No file small2e.aux.
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/omscmr.fd) [1]
(./small2e.aux) )
Output written on small2e.dvi (1 page, 1864 bytes).
Transcript written on small2e.log.

Use TeXLive in VSCode

Install the LaTeX Workshop extension pack then everything is ready to go.

TeXLive Configuration with CTeX (for writing Chinese)

For users who use additional languages like Chinese. xelatex is required to compile Unicode in LaTeX. The following error will be raised when compiling using pdflatex.

critical package ctex error:ctex fontset"fandol" is unavailable in current

However xelatex is not in the LaTeX Workshop extension pack default setting, we need to setup xelatex manually.

Firstly, open VSCode Setting, search latex.tools, click Edit in setting.json and append the following setting

{
	"name": "xelatex",
	"command": "xelatex",
	"args": [
		"-synctex=1",
		"-interaction=nonstopmode",
		"-file-line-error",
		"%DOC%"
	],
	"env": {}
}

Secondly, open VSCode Setting, search latex.recipes, click Edit in setting.json and append the following setting

{
	"name": "xelatex",
	"tools": [
		"xelatex"
	]
},
{
	"name": "xelatex ➞ bibtex ➞ xelatex*2",
	"tools": [
		"xelatex",
		"bibtex",
		"xelatex",
		"xelatex"
	]
}

Create a text.tex file below and use Recipe: xelatex to compile. You should see it compile successfully now.

\documentclass{ctexart}
\begin{document}
您好,\LaTeX!
\end{document}

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