[Mac OS X TeX] Re: TeXShop environment variables?

[V. Vatsal]

<x-flowed>Thanks for the message. That seems clear enough.

However, what's not clear to me is how to set up environment variables to 
use when calling TeX from the terminal. It seems that there's something 
wonky with the current texmf setup, because the moment I define the 
environment variable TEXMF, the terminal based teTeX breaks, as does the 
TeX+GS option from TeXShop. The former complains about not being able to 
find latex.fmt, and the latter just sits with an empty console.

It would be nice if TeXShop inherited paths from the variables, so that you 
don't have to keep trying to make links and to keep separate how the two 
versions work.



--On Monday, August 27, 2001 1:01 PM -0700 Richard Koch 
<koch at math.uoregon.edu> wrote:

> Folks,
>
> TeXShop does not use environment variables.
> At one time I tried to make it accept such variables using code
> outlined by Arum Mangalam, but I wasn't successful. Perhaps
> I didn't try hard enough!
>
> Environment variables run against the basic philosophy of
> TeXShop, which is to use Unix extensively as an engine, but avoid Unix
> for users as much as possible.
>
> To add files to teTeX, you are supposed to create a mirror tree
> inside your personal Library file. For example, if you want to add
> "myfile.sty" and the natural location for this file is in the misc
> directory of latex, create folders ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/misc
> and put myfile.sty in this folder.
>
> teTeX is usually configured so texhash is not needed when
> you add files to your local tree. Unfortunately, the very latest teTeX
> is probably misconfigured and Gerben is temporarily away. So after adding
> files, you must issue the command "texhash" in Terminal. We'll
> fix that as soon as possible.
>
> V. Vatsal reports that he has a personal texmf tree which TeXShop
> cannot see. If you already have a texmf tree somewhere, you can put
> a symbolic link to this tree in ~/Library and then TeXShop should find
> it. For instance, I moved my tree to my home directory and then typed
>
> 	cd
> 	cd Library
> 	ln  -s  /Users/koch/texmf   texmf
>
> and that worked.
>
> If environment variables are really important to you for reasons not
> covered above, feel free to lobby for them.
>
> Finally, Arum reported that he started his work to make ConTeXT's
> texexec work with TeXShop. I just learned about ConTeXT last week,
> and my intention is to add it to the Program menu so it will work
> automatically.
>
> Dick
> koch at math.uoregon.edu



-------------
Vinayak Vatsal
Department of Mathematics
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z2

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