Using the latest version of the memoir package for LaTeX

The research paper I’m currently writing with LaTeX uses the memoir document class, because it provides a lot of useful features. Recently I was reading a useful document explaining how to use the page styles in memoir to modify the headers and footers, but unfortunately some source code examples didn’t work. I figured out this was caused by my version of memoir being out of date. The version of memoir I used was provided by the Ubuntu package texlive-latex-recommended and was dated 2007/01/22, while the most recent version of memoir found here was last updated on 2009/02/06.

The process to use the latest version was easy, but the instructions on manually installing LaTeX packages on the Ubuntu Wiki and the instructions given in memoir’s README file were slightly misleading. All you need to do is create a directory named texmf in your home directory, then download the file memoir.tds.zip from memoir’s page on CTAN, and extract the contents of that file to the texmf directory. Then open a terminal and execute the command texhash ~/texmf. If you compile your LaTeX document again, the new version of memoir will be used instead of the old one provided by the Ubuntu package. To verify it, you can insert the \listfiles command in your document, and then check the log file after you’ve compiled your document.

I was surprised to notice that the version of memoir provided by the Ubuntu package is so old, especially because I’m using Ubuntu 9.04 which was released not long ago in April.