Local Installation of Class Files

[pyrogerg]

I'm using the Harvey Mudd problem-set document class (hmcpset.cls) for my statistics homework and, because it isn't in the repository, I have to have a copy of the file "hmcpset.cls" in the same as my tex document. Like many people, I have a separate directory for each tex document, and for me this has lead to (hopefully) unnecessary proliferation of hmcpset.cls. I found documentation for how to install packages manually in the texmf-local directory, but that isn't working for a class file. Can someone please help me with the proper way to do this?

Thanks in advance,
Gregory

[TeXnical Designs]

Hi Gregory,
Can you say what exactly you did or what set of instructions you followed?

What you are supposed to do, is move the files to the correct place in your local TeX directory tree. You may have seen this referred to as the texmf-local directory. So, for Windows using MikTeX, this might be C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\. Then you go to the texmf-local\tex\latex subdirectory. You can/should create a separate folder for you class file(s) and put them in there.

Next you have to refresh the database to your TeX engine knows where to find everything. This is important or nothing will work and how you do this depends on the installation of LaTeX on your system. These are the commands for the various installations

TeX Live: texhash
MikTeX: initexmf --update-fndb

You can also use the GUI for MikTeX. Go to Start -> All Programs -> MikTex -> Maintenance (Admin) -> Settings (Admin). Press the "Refresh FNDB" and it will refresh the database and you should be good to go.