[OS X TeX] simple question: where are the tex directories on a mac?

[Daniel Becker]

Am 29.06.2010 um 12:48 schrieb Balkenborg, Dieter:

> Dear Mac experts
> I am completely new to the Mac with no knowledge on unix. I am familiar with Dos and windows and must relearn. 
> I have successfully installed TexLive and compiled files with it.

Did you install MacTeX, the Mac-Variant of TeXLive? If not, do yourself a favor and use MacTeX. It is nothing but TeXLive but special care is taken to make life easier for Mac-Users, i.e. there is a SystemPreferencePane to switch between different TeX-Distributions you might have and a nice GUI (TeX Live Uility) to update your installation. See http://www.tug.org/mactex/


> Now i want to put my own style files into the appropriate directories, but using "finder" I cannot see any /usr/... directories or by searching find any .sty files on the Macintosh HD.

The Finder offers a "Go To" (?, "Gehe zu" in German) command that allows you to navigate to  /usr/. There are other ways to make invisible items visible and to include invisible files when searching for them.

If you have the already mentioned Distribution Pane, a double-click opens the corresponding directories that are hidden by default.

With MacTeX, an easy way to have a personal texmf-tree is to put it here:
~/Library/texmf/, that is /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/texmf/. You can put your style files there and you are done, no refreshing of the file database or so. TeXLive (and therefore MacTeX) offer more sophisticated ways to register a local texmf-tree that are appropriate when there are several users that use the TeX-Installation together.

Daniel

> The directories seem to be hidden, at least to the novice Mac user, while on a windows installation the text directory is clearly visible. I apologise for the simple question, but i have not been successful for days.
> Yours,
> Dieter
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