[OS X TeX] TeXShop and .cfg configuration files

AES siegman at stanford.edu
Wed Oct 11 22:01:12 EDT 2006


This note is to pass along another "solved" gotcha that I recently 
encountered in using LaTeX on TeXShop, just for the benefit of other 
newcomers and/or for any educational responses for my benefit that 
others may want to post in reply.

I started by creating a vanilla LaTeX "article" class source file for 
most of a document I was preparing, including the insertion of 
figures using graphics or graphicx, and everything worked as 
expected, including figures -- except typeset document was not in the 
desired final journal format I needed to end up with.

To get the desired final style (and a submittable electronic ms) I 
needed to use the RevTeX package mentioned in an earlier post from 
me; and so I copied over all the RevTeX .cls, .sty, .rtx, .bst and 
.cfg files I had used when preparing earlier manuscripts with 
Textures under OS 9 and put them into the texmf >> tex >> latex 
directory as instructed in the "Adding Personal Files" section of the 
TeXShop Help files.  (I knew that the RevTeX distribution had not 
changed since the version I had.)

After converting a few things to RevTeX syntax, everything went fine, 
document formatted beautifully, except no figures -- only captions 
under blank spaces, no actual figures.

After a lot of hassle and digging into confusing documentation, 
eventually figured out that there was a graphics.cfg file in the 
RevTeX folder which, when opened, turned out to point to "textures" 
and some driver gibberish.  Trashed it, and everything worked fine.

Observations:

1)  Spent years with Textures and never had to learn (or worry) about 
.cfg files.  They're not mentioned in the Textures manual.

2)  No mention of .cfg files in TeXShop Help files.  Apparently 
they're not needed -- but since there are multiple other discussions 
of "configurations" in these Help files (and multiple discussions of 
the alleged *need* for .cfg files in the documentation for the 
Graphics and Graphicx packages), might want to add a warning note 
that they (apparently) *shouldn't* be added . . . ?
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