[OS X TeX] Optimal Solution for an asymptotemk engine

[Herbert Schulz]

On Apr 10, 2010, at 10:52 AM, Peter Dyballa wrote:

> 
> Am 10.04.2010 um 14:34 schrieb Herbert Schulz:
> 
>> I haven't seen this happen.
> 
> 
> It happens kind of unpredictably. Recently I invoked TeX Live 2009's asy on an ASY file which was made by running pdflatex on the combined TEX source file. During this run asy even invoked pdflatex, which I only found because a system form appeared which informed me of the pdflatex crash and offered the choice to send a bug report to Apple. Similarly this happens more often with kpsewhich (kpsewhich --var-value=SELFAUTOPARENT, kpsewhich --var-value=ASYMPTOTE_HOME) (using for example simply dtruss produces quite a lot of output I haven't debugged completely yet). That this happens for *me* is clear: the RC files which set up a standard shell environment are still prepared for a TL 2008 environment. For particular shells or processes I set its run-time environment for TL '07 or '09, and usually the programmes I work with inherit this environment for shells they spawn in which they let run some other sub-process. Asy seems to be an exception in that it does not inherit the proper but the default login environment.
> 

Howdy,

Which RC files are you talking about? I'm not sure I'm fully understanding what you are saying here except that asy seems to be trying to run pdflatex and/or kpsewhich. Is the problem something internal to asy?

By the way, TL-2009 has asy 1.88 and the most recent version (along with asymptote.sty) is 1.91. But I have no idea what I'd have to do to build or install the latest version over the TL version. Would it be possible to use /usr/texbin/ as the internal path so it works with any version of asy and TL (well, starting with TL-2009 since previous version didn't have asy as far as I know.

> Similarly Jean-Claude has also something scrambled. Maybe in his ~/.asy directory?
> 

Hmmm... while I've got a ~/.asy directory it seems to be empty.

> BTW, 'asy -v' would show some output from processing the ASY file. If that's not enough, try with -vv. The -vvv level should really be enough for use with LaTeX. (Very curious users could try -vvvv or -vvvvv.)
> 

Hmmm... that might be a logical addition to the way asy is used in the asymptotemkrc file. Right now it's totally silent on my system.

> 
> I should talk to the asy authors later, I think...
> 
> --
> Greetings
> 
>  Pete
> 

That would be wonderful. Please keep me and the list informed.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)