This Nix flake provides easy access to development shells for multiple TeXlive versions. This is sometimes important, in particular for academic publishing when submitting the LaTeX source to publishers using different TeXlive versions. For example, arXiv used TeXlive 2020 for a while, while at the same time Overleaf used 2022, Quantum Information Processing used 2023 and ScholarOne still uses TeXlive 2013 (we provide 2012 as best working approximation in Nixpkgs).
Current available versions in TeXshell: 2012, 2021, 2022, 2023 (default).
2020 was removed when arXiv switched to 2022, because after 2012 until 2020,
texdoc didn't work in the TeXlive provided by nixpkgs, and we had a complicated workaround.
arXiv currently uses 2023.
To fire up a shell with TeXlive available, run
$ nix shell github:jorsn/texshell.nix
The command can even be simplified by registering texshell in the flake registry:
$ nix registry add texshell github:jorsn/texshell.nix
Then, to get, e.g., TeXlive 2022, run
$ nix shell texshell#tl2022
To have (almost, see above) the same TeXlive version as [arXiv] currently uses, run
$ nix shell texshell#arxiv
This also works for all supported LaTeX versions. You can list the available development shells and more, by running
$ nix flake show
To use the dev shell or a particular TeXlive version in your flake, you can declare texshell as a flake input.
To initialize a new flake using texshell, you can run
$ nix flake init -t github:jorsn/ancienTeX.nix
ISC license, see file LICENSE.