[Mac OS X TeX] Re: Mac TeX/LaTeX Web Site

[V. Vatsal]

<x-flowed>Hi,

I've had this problem recently, and managed to fix it after much 
aggravation. The answer has to do with environment variables and what you 
have in your .cshrc file.

As I understand from Richard Koch, TeXShop usually doesn't see environment 
variables -- rather it relies on certain expectations of the way teTeX is 
set up. He tells me that when you call pdflatex, TeXShop calls the Unix 
task directly, without going via the shell, so none of the shell variables 
get passed on. If you have the teTeX that is supplied with TeXShop, this 
method will generally work. On the other hand, when you pick the TeX+GS 
option, TeXShop calls the altpdflatex script, which is then responsible for 
calling TeX. Since altpdflatex is a shell script, it inherits shell 
variables, which are passed to TeX.

It seems that what happens here is that TeXShop gets confused if the shell 
variables are defined so that the shell must perform some kind of variable 
expansion to interpret them. Eg, suppose you have something in your .cshrc 
like

setenv PATH "${PATH}:/usr/X11R6/bin:/Applications/OSXvnc.app/Contents/MacOS"
setenv MANPATH "${MANPATH}:/usr/X11R6/man:/usr/local/man"

(This was taken from an earlier post by Michael Murray on this subject.)

This will confuse TeXShop, because it doesn't seem to understand how to 
make sense of things like ${PATH} and ${MANPATH}. Indeed, as the TeXShop 
manual says somewhere, the program relies on absolute paths to work. I'm 
not sure why this is, but it appears to have been what's causing the 
problem, at least on my system, and that of one other user.

In short, try going through your .cshrc and changing all paths to absolute 
and literal paths, avoiding the use of variables and expansion. I'm not 
sure which variables TeXShop sees -- I changed $PATH, $MANPATH, and all TeX 
related ones, which in my case means I changed them all. Maybe one doesn't 
have to worry about non TeX variables, I don't know about that. Anyway, now 
TeX+GS works for me, with all variables seen and used.

You should also be careful about the variable TEXMF, if you have is defined 
it somewhere -- it often defined in terms of things like $TEXMFMAIN, or 
$TEXMFLOCAL, and these won't work with TeXShop. If you want to add more 
texmf trees, then you should get the default kpathsea value coming from the 
teTeX distribution (run texconfig from the termimal on a fresh 
installation: remember to delete your cshrc first!) and add your 
definitions to what TeXShop is expecting.

Good luck.


--On Wednesday, August 29, 2001 12:19 AM -0400 Marc Parizeau 
<parizeau at mac.com> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I've just installed TexShop 1.12 on MacOS 10.0.4. Everything seems to
> work fine when I typeset using pdftex. However, the TeX and Ghostscript
> typeset option produces no output. When I click on the Latex button, the
> error console opens but remains empty and nothing happens. I've also
> tried to open an eps file and nothing happens. I guess there must be
> something wrong with my installation but what could it be???
>
> As instructed, I've installed the new teTex and ghostscript (over the
> old). I didn't changed the "engine" settings. They point to:
>
> /usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current
> pdftex
> pdflatex
> altpdftex
> altpdflatex
>
> respectivelly. From a terminal, I've tried to run altpdflatex on a sample
> file and it worked fine (producing both a .dvi and a .pdf).
>
> So does anyone have any idea on what could be the problem?
>
> Many thanks in advance,
> --
> Marc Parizeau
>
>
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-------
V. Vatsal
Department of Mathematics
University of British Columbia
Vancouver V6T 1Z2
Canada

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