[OS X TeX] Re: ``/usr/texbin/pdflatex´´ does not exist

[Charlse Darwin]

On Apr 10, 2008, at 9:48 PM, Richard Koch wrote:
Charlse,


You might like to look at BasicTeX at my web page

	www.uoregon.edu/~koch

and also at the associated document on the site explaining how it was  
made. To get the "TeX Distribution Preference Pane" mentioned  
earlier, it would be enough to install this 39 meg package. This  
would also give you another TeX distribution, entirely in /usr/local/ 
texlive/2007basic. At the end, if you don't want this distribution,  
you could just put 2007basic in the trash.

I installed the package. Although with (pdf)Tex path set to /opt/ 
local/bin and Distiller path set to /opt/local/share I was getting  
the same result; no more error message but the file I am trying to  
view still opens as a bunch of codes. Here is a copy of the file:
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The real goal of all of this is to make all TeX utilities work just  
out of the box without reconfiguration. This includes several front  
ends: TeXShop, iTeXMac, and others,
as well as useful utilities like LaTeXiT and BibDesk.

The idea is that all of these utilities would point to

	/usr/texbin/pdflatex

or /usr/texbin/latex or whatever. But /usr/texbin would just be a  
symbolic link to the currently active TeX distribution. A tiny  
preference pane in Apple's System Preferences would list all existing  
TeX distributions and allow users to pick a different active  
distribution. This would actually reset /usr/texbin, but all of the  
Unix magic is hidden from the user, who needs only pick an element in  
a list. Then automatically, ALL TeX front ends and utilities would be  
reconfigured without doing anything. This system even allows the path  
to be changed so command line work from Terminal automatically picks  
pdflatex, tex, config-sys, or other utilities from the currently  
active distribution. To make this work with MacPorts requires one  
tiny change in your path, which is explained in the document  
mentioned earlier. So the goal isn't just to make TeXShop work out of  
the box, but to make ALL utilities for TeX just work right out of the  
box.

With just a little more work, MacPorts could participate in this  
community, so users who install TeX with MacPorts would also get all  
of these benefits. In particular, TeXShop, LaTeXiT, etc. would work  
immediately with no configuration.

I'm Ccing to folks at Macports in order to get their side of the story?

All of this is also described in a recent issue of TugBoat, the TeX  
User Group's quarterly journal.

Dick
koch at math.uoregon.edu