[OS X TeX] Staying on the right PATH (or something)

[Morten Høgholm]

Hi all,

Forgive me if the following is just me being naïve.


I am trying to support some users using Texmaker on both *nix, OS X and  
Windows. In order to do so, it must be configured correctly and this is  
where the fun begins... We want to avoid giving a full path to the  
executable as often the system knows what to do with a file. On OS X we  
have
   open %.pdf
which will then do as expected. Similarly, we discovered that on Windows  
we could use
   cmd /C start %.pdf
and this then does the same as open. Good.

On Windows, latex and friends are added to the PATH by MiKTeX and so one  
can call it as
   latex %.tex
This works on *nix as well but not on OS X even though latex is of course  
in the PATH. Can anybody explain to me why this is? TeXShop expects the  
path to the executable as well, right? And what does an application like  
Aquamacs do differently, since it just has a call to latex and doesn't  
care where it is located?

I would appreciate it if someone could enlighten me in this matter.

TIA
-- 
Morten