LaTeX on OS X

As said earlier there are multiple ways of getting a TeX distribution. Hovever, we recommend the usage of Mac TeX for OS X. Follow the description below to download and install the Mac TeX package.

Package Manager Installation

Download and install MacTeX (LaTeX package manager for OS X)

http://www.tug.org/mactex

Additional Tools/Packages

Latexmk

(A Perl script to compile LaTeX source file; Highly recommended)

It’s probably already installed. If not, open “TeX Live Utility”, search for “latexmk” and install it. If you prefer using the Terminal. Read the section about Latexmk for more information about the CLI build tool.

# tlmgr install latexmk

SVG Package

Inkscape is used either to draw vector graphics and/or to convert SVGs into PDFs on-the-fly. A conversion is needed because LaTeX has no native support for the SVG format.

Download the installer of Inkscape
Install Inkscape as described in the official Inkscape installation manual.
In order to get the correct Inkscape command line functionality, create a soft-link from /usr/local/bin to the application.
(In OS X Big Sur the installation path is the following /Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/MacOS/inkscape).
Further, details are described in the Inkscape wiki.

# ln -s <PATH_TO_INKSCAPE> /usr/local/bin/inkscape

Fonts

Check if the font nunito is installed on your system. It is the default one for our template and thus required.

If not, install the fonts with your package manager. CTAN

Biber

Download the zip/tar file from the offical release website.

Editor

As described earlier, you can literally use any plain text editor to edit LaTeX documents. However, for beginners we recommend installing one of the editors listed below.