[OS X TeX] pdflatex.fmt format file missing

[Robert Morelli]

Richard Koch wrote:
> 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.

Ah, that explains a lot. Why am I always the last to know?

Well, the fist step in solving my problem was:
fink remove tetex

...

I installed TeX-Live. Everything seems to be working now, but I have two 
questions:

1. What previewers are people using? I use the pdf viewer Skim which has 
auto-syncing and
seems a reasonable choice in conjunction with pdflatex. Skim wasn't 
discontinued 2 years ago,
was it? :)

2. TeX-Live on Mac seems to handle the $TEXMF environment variable 
differently than other systems.
A short note in the readme file indicates that this variable does not 
need to be set on OS X and that
tex searches in ~/Library/texmf for personal style files. I can see the 
logic of that, but I'd prefer to go
on doing things the old way because I occasionally use other Unix 
systems. Specifically, I'd like to
tell tex to look in certain directories within my home directory tree 
for additional style files. What's
the standard way to do that?



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