[OS X TeX] pdflatex.fmt format file missing

[Richard Koch]

Robert,

> What's puzzling me most about this situation is that no one else is  
> aware of it. I was under the impression that
> tetex was a pretty standard tex distribution for OS X and that  
> pdflatex was a pretty commonplace use of a
> tex system. Am I wrong, or is tex just not used that much on OS X?

In May, 2006, Thomas Esser announced the end of support for teTeX, and  
recommended that users switch to TeX Live. The Mac world has  
essentially made this switch.  Fink and MacPorts, however, still  
provide teTeX in their distributions.

I recommend looking at

	www.tug.org/mactex

and

	www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html

for much more up to date packages. The major packages are

	gwTeX

and

	MacTeX-2007 (i.e., TeXLive-2007)

The first is a remarkably complete subset of TeXLive, with additions,  
maintained by Gerben Wierda. The second is the full TeX Live  
distribution for the Mac. TeX Live runs on almost all architectures:  
OS X, Windows, Linux, Unix, etc.

Dick Koch
koch at math.uoregon.edu

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