How to Install Custom LaTeX Extensions with MacTeX

When writing articles for conferences, authors are often supplied with custom layout templates, classes, bibliography styles etc. for LaTeX. The most common file extensions of these files are:

  • .cls – Class files to add new document classes
  • .bst – BibTeX Style files to format your bibliography
  • .sty – Style files containing LaTeX macros

Using those files documents are created according to the style guidelines of the conference proceedings / journals the article will be published in. When using MacTeX on Mac OS X, the proper location for custom extensions is:

~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/

where ~ ist your user home folder. I particularly needed this to install the LaTeX template for Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), which are available here. After copying the whole llncs folder into ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/, I could use the class in my LaTeX environment like this:

\documentclass{llncs}

Happy publishing 🙂

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