How to install LaTeX package called "standalone" properly so I can get update with Synaptic package manager?

Solution 1:

I'm the author of standalone. It is newer than TeX Live 2009, which is the version installed by Ubuntu and Debian. The current TeX Live version is 2011. If you install the vanilla version directly you get a TeX packages manager called tlmgr which can be used to install and update packages as long as they are part of TeX Live. I heavily recommend you to do a manual install. You can find instructions on TeX.SX: How to install “vanilla” TeXLive on Debian or Ubuntu?

Then you can install standalone with the following command:

tlmgr install standalone

BTW, you can update the packages and tlmgr itself using:

tlmgr update --self --all

An alternative is to install only the package manually. This can be very easily done using the TDS ZIP file available under http://mirrors.ctan.org/install/macros/latex/contrib/standalone.tds.zip. Simply unzip it in your local TEXMF folder, usally ~/texmf. You might need to run texhash ~/texmf afterwards.

Solution 2:

UPDATE (2015-12-07): standalone.sty should now be installable with a simple

sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-extra

. Keeping the answer for reference.

The search

sudo apt-file search standalone.sty

doesn't give any results. This means that the package cannot be installed using Synaptic.

The reason is found in the answer by Martin Scharrer: The package is not included in TeXlive 2009 because it's too new. TeXLive 2009 is the version packaged with Ubuntu, there is no TeXlive 201. Also, the Ubuntu packages don't seem to receive updates once they're out.

The above is the reason why I installed TeXlive using tlmgr in my home, in ~/.texlive2011. Works like a charm.

Solution 3:

After installing and updating apt-file (sudo apt-get install apt-file; sudo apt-file update), I ran apt-file search standalone.sty and saw that it belonged to texlive-latex-extra.

So I just installed it (sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-extra) and it worked.