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how local does texmf-local have to be?

I have about 6 different computers, osx and linux, different versions, some on virtual machines. can I create one ~/Dropbox/texmf-local/ folder, and ln -s it to /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local (replacing the stub tree) on each of my 6 machines? this way, I would not need to customize individual machines. I just customize "me" once, and my modifications would propagate to any of my computers immediatley. possible?

I am positive this works with the latex input style files. they are just ASCII files that are the same across architectures.

I am not sure that it works with fonts. the resulting font files may not be platform-agnostic...or are they?

after I have hooked in such a universally shared texmf-local, do I need to run a texhash on each machine, or only once on one machine? if texhash writes its ls-lR.gz into the top directory, doing it once may well be all that is needed. what about the fonts---mktexlsr and updmap -sys ?

tex wizard help appreciated.

Guido
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ivo Welch
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    It works with fonts as well. What you have to do on the various machine is to add the dropbox folder to the local TEXMF system variable or link the local texmf-local folder to it. – Guido Oct 12 '14 at 06:29
  • The only problem that I can think of is having to build the TeX file database whenever you add files to or remove files from the local tree. – ChrisS Oct 12 '14 at 06:33
  • To avoid rebuiding the Tex file database, share the personnal texmf tree. – Tarass Oct 12 '14 at 13:44
  • thank you. one warning to others going this route: if you use Dropbox, there is a sync period. you cannot try it immediately elsewhere. make sure to let it complete. otherwise, the latex errors can be baffling. trust me on this---I tried it out. – ivo Welch Oct 12 '14 at 16:44
  • I did the same thing using github! – Alessandro Cuttin Feb 16 '20 at 21:35

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