Can't access the Texlive packages documentation

I recently installed the core packages of the «texlive» LaTeX distribution, and tried to use the “texdoc” utility to access the documentation of various LaTeX packages. In my case I tried to invoke the «titlesec» package typing «texdoc titlesec», but the terminal responded:

texdoc error: No texlive.tlpdb nor shipped tlpdb data found.

In Debian I would type “apt-file search texlive.tpldb” to locate the package that provides the “texlive.tpldb” file, but apt-file is obviously not available in Manjaro and I don’t know what is the Manjaro equivalent. Some internet search results suggested that perhaps the “pacman -F texlive.tpldb” would do the trick, but in my case the command returns an empty result. Does this mean that “texlive.tpldb” isn’t packaged? Is this a packaging error?

Does anybody know how to get rid of this error? Or, more generally, how to install and access the LaTeX documentation?

Thanks a lot!

Hi @Orestes,

It’e in the AUR, albeit outdated. Look at the first comment, the pinned one:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/texlive-tlpdb

Hope it helps!

Hi @Mirdarthos. Thanks for answering.

I only see one comment in the link you provide. It suggests an alternative script (to texdoc) which seems to download the documentation files on demand if they’re not installed. But this script uses the “tllocalmgr” utility, which I don’t have installed, and “pacman -F tllocalmgr” doesn’t tell me which package contains this utility.

Can you give me some additional guidance? Do I have to install some package from AUR (that scares me a bit). Sorry if I’m a bit lost in Manjaro/Arch, but I’m coming from Debian and I am not used to the new system’s spells.

You are welcome!

Coming from Ubuntu, I can understand that it’s very different.

The AUR doesn’t have to scare you. One the page I gave you the link to, for example, click on the “View PKGBUILD” link on the right. On the window with the script that opens, you can inspect what the script will do to install the package on your system. There you’ll be able to see all commands that run, so you’ll be able to see if something dodgy will happen.

Yes, the usage of the AUR is at own risk. But:

  1. Seeing as you can inspect the PKGBUILD files, you can choose not to install something that seems dodgy, so the risk is minimal.
  2. There are so many packages in the AUR, it would be impossible for Manjaro too test them all.

So that’s why there is a warning.


Yes, you’ll have to install the tllocalmgr from the AUR.

$ pamac search tllocalmgr
tllocalmgr-git                                                                                                                                                                                                                           r84.bbd8488-5  AUR
A shell and command-line utility to manage TeXLive on Arch Linux

To do so, from a terminal, run:

pamac build tllocalmgr-git

For more information:


Hope this helps!

pamac search -h

Using the Manjaro package manager Pamac - you would do

pamac search -f texlive.tpldb

To read the man page for pamac

man pamac

To search using pacman (work only with repo packages NOT AUR)

pacman -F texlive.tpldb
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Thanks! It finally worked after some failed trials (i didn’t have the AUR repo enabled in Pamac preferences at fist).

Now the documentation is downloaded and compiled on demand, using the script provided in the link you mentioned.

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