[OS X TeX] Engines in TeXShop

[Herbert Schulz]

> On Oct 4, 2016, at 7:53 AM, Simon Spiegel <simon at simifilm.ch> wrote:
> 
>> Howdy,
>> 
>> That directive tells TeXShop to use the biber in the TeX Distribution. 
>> 
>> You might try to use the line
>> 
>> % !BIB TS-program = /opt/local/bin/biber
>> 
>> and see if that works.
> 
> This does not work. I get the error message "The program /opt/local/bin/biber does not exist“.
> 
> If TeXShop uses the programs from MacTeX (or whatever distribution is used) by default, the current help text is a bit confusing. I talks alternately about adding engines and defining the default programs of a document, thought the two things are not really related. Wll, they are in some way, but obviously engines have no influence on the default programs defined in a document.
> 
>> PS: Where did you put the newer biblatex package?
> 
> In my local tree.
> 
> Simon
> 
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> Simon Spiegel
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Howdy,

TeXShop executes programs that are in /Library/TeX/texbin (which points to the active binaries of your TeX Distribution) by default. Engines (see below) execute programs that are along the PATH variable passed to the Engine or the path explictely given (e.g., /opt/local/bin/biber)

The Engines are really just shell scripts stored with the extension .engine, taking a single argument (the file to be typeset --- with extension) and is executed with Typeset->Typeset (Cmd-T) when you have the line

% !TEX TS-program = engine-name

where engine-name doesn't have the .engine extension (e.g., pdflatexmk). You can create an engine that calls pdflatex, biber, etc. on the file (you need to strip off the .tex from the file name). 

Let me know what processing you wish to do and I'll try to help out.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)