[OS X TeX] Shell escape and MacTeX 2009

[Herbert Schulz]

On Apr 6, 2010, at 12:55 AM, Robert Morelli wrote:

> I recently upgraded from MacTeX 2008 to 2009. When I did that, the packages
> that depend on shell-escape stopped working. For instance, I use the gnuplottex
> package with the epstopdf package. With MacTeX 2008, all I'd have to do is
> pdflatex a document and it would automatically generate a gnuplot file, run
> gnuplot on it, generate an eps, convert it to pdf, and include it in the pdf output.
> None of that works anymore, even if I run pdflatex on the command line with
> the shell-escape option, like
> pdflatex --shell-escape myfile.tex
> 
> Does anyone know what the problem might be?
> 
> Thanks
> 

Howdy,

No problem here running with shell-escape and MacTeX(TeX Live)-2009.

When you say ``it doesn't work'' do you mean that there is an updated foo.eps and an older foo.pdf file present in the folder and you use \includegraphics[...]{foo}, i.e., without the extension, in your document? With the latest versions (i.e., what comes with TL-2009) of epstopdf the foo.pdf will be found BEFORE the updated foo.eps so no processing will be done. Also the new epstopdf does foo.eps->foo-eps-converted-to.pdf rather than foo.eps->foo.pdf by default. YOIu can get the original behavior by creating a file named epstopdf-sys.cfg that contains the lines

% to get old behavior foo.eps->foo.pdf as well as update,prepend
\epstopdfsetup{program at epstopdf=epstopdf,verbose,update,prepend,prefersuffix=false,suffix=}

and place it in your personal texmf tree in something like ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/config/ (where ~ is your HOME directory and you create the folders as necessary). If you add the the lines

% tif->png
\epstopdfDeclareGraphicsRule{.tif}{png}{.png}{convert #1 \OutputFile}
\PrependGraphicsExtensions{.tif}

to that file you can get automatic conversion of .tif->.png (using the convert program supplied by MacTeX) too.

If that doesn't work please let us see a minimal but compilable sample file that shows the behavior.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)