[lelanthran]

> That said, I eventually tired of the obtuse error messages and felt I was making things more complicated for no real gain.

The error messages are pretty poor.

> Even keeping a BasicTex environment working requires effort that HTML does not.

I've been told, by Mac and Winodws users, that it's a pain.

Personally I've never had to download extra packages/styles directly on Debian. Performing `apt-get install tex-<whatever>` normally installs everything (where `<whatever>` is something I find from a search in synaptic).

[chrisfinazzo]

I solved the issue by installing manually, but even that is a pain with TeX Live - some of the directory tree needed to be created before BasicTex was aware of the packages I was using.