For a revision of an ACS journal article I'm required to make a number of fixes that result from me using an outdated version of the achemso.sty file as that is the one in Texlive 2014. Essentially their requirements and hence the sty-file has changed since Texlive 2014 was released. Not something I spotted before submission...making this suddenly urgent.

At the moment I have TexLive 2014 installed from slackbuilds. As texlive got updated in the beginning of June it looks easiest to update it to the 2015 version, but I find it hard to see how to do that seeing the complexity of the Texlive Slackbuild. Did anybody already look at this that could provide the updated Slackbuild for texlive?

btw) I did spot the guide on slackdocs to use the native texlive installer, see here. However I find that one puzzling as to pick up the correct executables I assume one needs to remove the default tetex and tetex-doc to make that approach work? Yet that doesn't get mentioned in the guide.

Chemist that just defended and turned in his dissertation last week that used latex/achemso. It seems to me it would be easier to only upgrade the .sty package instead of the entire texlive distribution IF the formatting is the result of only the achemso.sty.

Or even a very quick hack would be to rename the .sty package, define the new style package in your preamble with your new name, and place the rename sty file in the folder you are building from. It should use that style when you build.

Edit: I should have noted that I ended up defining/editing the style in my local build folder to appease the format nazi for my university, that's the reason I mentioned I turned mine in last week - had to do this myself.

The slackbuild actually looks pretty straightforward. Have you tried grabbing the newer source for tuxlive and changing the version in the slackbuild?

Also, this slackbuild is maintained by Robby Workman (one of the core Slackware developers and one of the maintainers of SBo), and if you shoot him an email (rworkman at slackbuilds dot org), he might get it updated for you.

Thanks for the response PhiloPolyMath; the brute force approach to replace the achemso folder indeed fixes one of my problems which was that keywords didn't display. The other one is weird as I still find it hard to belief that achemso doesn't automatically abbreviate journal titles...pretty brain-dead to have to do that manually.

btw) I'm still interested to get this fixed properly, ie to get Texlive updated as a whole.

No I haven't tried this as further down the slackbuild other packages get build from different sources that also have newer versions upstream.

So which ACS journal is this? I'm on my linux box right now (I have a macbook pro that I used in the office since I needed word, endnote, chemdraw, etc for collaborations) but I think that even in EndNote that ACS is different style than say JACS or Macromolecules. The editors of the different journals make that call I guess. So I'm wondering if there is a different bib style that you could do the same thing with. Does the journal have anything like that available online? Trying to get their formatting how they want it is such a pain.

Edit: Just looked, it seems that within the achemso bib style it lists support for abbreviating journal names. However, it doesn't do it automatically. I also can't find any option to set to force tex to perform the abbreviation. It seems that some reference management software (potentially JabRef, which is what I used) has the option to go through your list of references and abbreviate them. That way, when they are included in the document they are abbreviated already.

Edit 2: This is going to bother me until I figure it out. Potentially you can define the journal as an option for document class. See the link and check out this person's template. By the way, this is an interesting blog for using linux in the sciences. He does some really hardcore (in my opinion) things for NMR analysis with the command line.

http://verahill.blogspot.com/2013/12...-template.html

This is for ACS Photonics and I have specified the journal in the document header in a very similar way as your link as that is a pretty standard template. For now I've just edited the bib-file to get the right titles as the deadline to get this resubmitted is approaching rapidly as I'm very good at procrastinating.

btw) If your interested in seeing someone pushing the use of linux in the sciences to the extreme, then this group is worth looking at. I find it fascinating to see how he has made org-mode a crucial ingredient in teaching, research and managing a research group.

Texlive and texlive-mf both use the same date in here and they get their version number from the same location...

xindy is containted in the texlive source, and biber has no version in the filename (and it doesn't seem to be specified anywhere).

It looks like if you just download texlive and texlive-texmf-tetexish, and assuming they are the same date, you should only need to change the VERSION variable at the beginning. Assuming biber-linux_x86_32.tar.gz doesn't have an update past 1.8, the should work without any problem, and if it does have an update, you should be able to just download the new one.

So, if both the textlive downloads have the same date, just extract all the slackbuild files to a directory, download the texlive, texlive-texmf-tetexish, and biber files and keep them in the same directory, modify the VERSION variable at the top of the SlackBuild and then have at it.

(If the two texlive downloads have a different date, keep the date for texlive as VERSION and then change TEXMF_VERS to the date of the texlive-texmf-tetexish date then run the SlackBuild.)

See http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/1...xscythe/README and http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/1...ware-plists.sh.
make-slackware-plists.sh describes well enough how to use svn to get a new texlive.tlpdb, and also which sources are needed for generating the tarballs. It's very straight forward, though time intensive, to generate the new tarballs. I was almost finished building the first package, but a change in maketexfmt makes it impossible to build non-root (I usually use fakeroot, but here that bombs). My current build is maybe about half way through. I'll send adjustments I had to make to rlw when I get a complete build of all three packages.

Ok, I've managed to get successful builds with 20150523. Other than generating new tarballs with texscythe, I only had to make a small change in the main texlive script the get perl to find the TeXLive:TLUtils module in the $PKG dir. I'll send the changes to Robby after I've made up proper patches. Maybe he'll have time to review them.

EDIT: sent out. need to do some testing now of the resulting packages.

Fantastic news j_v; many thanks for the effort on this!

I'm looking forward to see the updates appearing once Robby has found the time to look at it.

I usually install texlive manually because I often rely on new luatex features and want to be fully updated. I install the new version, keeping the old one in the background for further use. This approach needs a fast repository, though. Setting the $PATH variable to include the tex binaries is the only additional thing to do, as far as I remember. tlmgr updates nicely if no version changes are necessary. And using it breaks the package structure anyways...

Just for the sake of completeness...

Franz