Use latex with matplotlib on HPCs where you can't sudo!

2023-07-09-latex-matplotlib-on-HPCs.md

Have you ever wanted to use LaTeX with matplotlib? You are definitely not alone. There are many tutorials out there that can guide you through the installation process. Then we can just follow the official documentation to make plots by activating plt.rcParams['text.usetex'] = True.

What we need to do is just installing typical latex by

sudo apt update
sudo apt install texlive # for minimum latex build
sudo apt install dvipng texlive-latex-extra texlive-fonts-recommended # required by matplotlib

Then we are good to go! Note that the lightest texlive installation is not enough, and if you try to use plt.rcParams['text.usetex'] = True you will find there are packages missing like type1cm.sty, dvipng, etc.

What if we cannot sudo on the specific computer? Then this post is what you are looking for!

What if I can't sudo!

Things get tricky when we want to install latex on computers where we don't have administrative privileges (such as HPCs). We cannot use sudo install latex-* anymore and need to download and install texlive manually.

1. Follow the instruction on official texlive website to build from scratch

   wget https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz # or curl instead of wget
   zcat < install-tl-unx.tar.gz | tar xf -
   cd install-tl-*
   perl ./install-tl --no-interaction # as root or with writable destination

2. Prepend <installed texlive path>/bin/PLATFORM to your PATH, e.g., ~/texlive/YYYY/bin/x86_64-linux
3. Download and extract the missing package to latex library folder (e.g. <path to texlive>/texmf-dist/tex/latex/type1cm)

   wget https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/type1cm.zip
   unzip type1cm.zip

4. Run latex to generate .sty file

   latex type1cm.ins

5. Update and link the file by executing mktexlsr

   .<path to texlive folder>/texmf-dist/scripts/texlive/mktexlsr

Then voilà! Happy plotting matplotlib supported with latex on any system! Leave a comment or buy me a coffee if you like this post! 🙂

Good stuff, thanks!