[OS X Emacs] latex + dvips + ps2pdf from Aquamacs

[Ettore Aldrovandi]

Hi John,

thanks for the clarifications.

> On Nov 1, 2020, at 12:44, John Wroclawski <jtw at csail.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
>> On Nov 1, 2020, at 12:30 PM, Ettore Aldrovandi <ealdrov at math.fsu.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> what Pete says is correct. (It’s indeed great to see him back on the list.) However, if you install TeX Live via MacTex, the installer takes care of putting the appropriate item in /etc/paths.d, so that shouldn’t be the issue, as you say. 
> 
> Without speculating at all on what’s happening to Roussanka, it might be worth noting in passing that
> 
> - ps2pdf is part of ghostscript, not TeXLive, and normally lives in /usr/local/bin. (so the TeXLive /etc/paths.d file isn’t relevant to this particular program..)

Yes, you are right. Even better. The path is synthesized by calling /usr/libexec/path_helper, which takes care of putting /usr/local/bin in it before looking into /etc/paths.d.  This happens in both bash and zsh (through different startup files, of course).

> - ps2pdf is also typically a chain of three or four shell scripts before it gets to actually running gs, and I suppose it could possibly have been broken by the switch to zsh (running 10.14 here, can’t check..)

Eventually they all call ps2pdfwr, which calls gs. But due to the way bash and zsh construct the path, the result should be the same.  Bash would call path_helper in /etc/profile. Zsh does the same in /etc/zprofile. 

> - simpdftex, which Roussanka mentioned in other contexts, _is_ part of TeXLive and typically lives in /Library/TeX/texbin/. But it itself manipulates paths to find the programs it uses. So the fact that simpdftex can find ps2pdf doesn’t necessarily mean that other things will. 
> 
> (Is AQM using simpdftex, or calling programs directly?)

No idea. I see that Aquamacs adds /Library/TeX/texbin to the path itself. I have TeXLive installed in /opt and therefore no /Library/TeX/texbin in my path, but it’s there in Aquamacs when I run (getenv “PATH”).

—Ettore