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Some days ago, at July 8, TeX Live 2012 has been released. In the meantime, I also updated to Ubuntu 12.04. (Precise) but I did not find the time to install TeX Live. I am happy to report that there is nothing new to learn regarding the installation. You can straight follow the very same instructions I posted earlier for TeX Live 2011. Have fun.

Update: I noticed that TeX Live 2012 has been made available via apt-get. I recommend testing it out (I haven’t done so yet).

It took me a while to find out how to install the latest TeX Live 2011 package on my Ubuntu 10.10 system. So this is a short summary of my success story.

First of all, it is worth mentioning that the default PPA installs TeX Live 2009.

As of July 2011 the texlive package that ships with Ubuntu (TeX Live 2009) is lagging two years behind the current TeX Live release (TeX Live 2011). If you want the latest version of TeX Live, you can install it directly from the TeX Live website (this does not interfere with the packages in Ubuntu).

Though, it is not too difficult to manually install TeX Live 2011 from the sources following these instructions. In this process, I decided to download the TexLive package via rsync since it can be a rather big installation.

After successfully installing TeX Live itself, I set up the latest version of Kile (which is 2.1.0 as of today) following this description.

UPDATE!

Please mind that there is TexLive 2012 as described in a follow up article. There is also a PPA available to avoid the manual setup.

Due to their default behavior to handle differences on a line-by-line level most of the version control systems seem to be impractical when writing texts others than source code. Also git highlights changes to text files line-wise.

After some research I found some nice options to improve things.

Coloring words using git diff

git diff --color-words

Coloring words using gitk

gitk --word-diff=plain
gitk --word-diff=porcelain
gitk --word-diff=color

The gitk parameter option seems to be new and/or undocumented since I could neither find it on the man page of gitk nor I did get it with the auto-completion. Please find further interesting thoughts in the discussion of András Salamon on StackExchange and Eduardo’s post. Also Iain Murray’s cwdiff wrapper might be worth taking a closer look.

Gitk differences colored at line-level

Gitk differences colored at word-level