Every few years, we find ourselves installing a new LaTeX package on a Mac, and every few years, we find ourselves searching for the same set of directory paths, the same texhash invocation, and the same reminders that the LaTeX package installer is not, in fact, going to create any directories for us.

So this post is here mostly as a note to our future selves.

Where TeX Looks First

We use MacTeX (http://www.tug.org/mactex/), and MacTeX installs its files under /usr/local/texlive/. That is the system-wide texmf tree.

Personal TeX files should not go there …