[OS X TeX] Staying up to date with programs Gerben used to maintain

[Richard Koch]

Folks,

I'm not sure what the point of this message is,

On Dec 13, 2007, at 7:06 PM, dan at geer.org wrote:

>
> FWIW, MacPorts is ostensibly in Venezuela
> (and webmaster at macports.org bounces).
>
> --dan

but the guy in charge of MacPorts, Jim Berry, is a friend in Portland  
and one of the smartest programmers I know. I met Juan Palacios, the  
Venezuela connection mentioned above, at the Apple Developer  
Conference last June; he's an enthusiastic young guy and Mac fanatic  
with lots of ideas.

Both Fink and MacPorts make important contributions to the Mac world.  
The TeX Distribution Preference Panel and data structure by Jerome  
Laurens and Gerben Wierda that is installed by MacTeX recognizes both  
Fink and MacPort's TeX distributions and can be used to switch between  
them and Gerben's gwTeX or MacTeX; the only caveat is that you must  
modify your PATH and add /usr/texbin before /sw/bin or /opt/local/bin  
to make the pane switch command line typesetting. I've tried this and  
it works fine. For example, xdvi is part of TeX Live, but with this  
configuration it automatically picks up the Fink or MacPorts version  
of Ghostscript to image graphics.

It would not be difficult to make a MacTeX ghostscript install package  
based on 8.61, but I'd like someone else to provide clear  
configuration and make instructions. Remember that Gerben provides a  
universal binary of gs, and packages TWO versions, one with X11  
support and one without. The current MacTeX package sets the gs link  
to point to the appropriate package at installation time, as does i- 
Installer.

Dick
koch at math.uoregon.edu