[OS X TeX] Placement of files

[Michael Sharpe]

> On Oct 1, 2018, at 8:21 AM, Nitecki, Zbigniew H. <Zbigniew.Nitecki at tufts.edu> wrote:
> 
> Here is my immediate problem:
> I have a folder, called “Book(update 2018) which has the text files for a book; among the .tex file is also a folder called Bookmacros(2018) in which I have the user-defined macros I use in this book.This is an update of a book already submitted and in fact under production at the publisher, but I wanted an up-to-date corrected version, which is the intention of this folder.  In the master tex file (which calls all the others) I have the command
> \usepackage{Bookmacros(2018)/formatstyle} pointing to the macro file inside the Bookmacros(2018) folder that governs some formatting issues.
> It is clear to me that this file is not being accessed (but some other version elsewhere on my computer is) because when I compile the masterful
> i get an error message about an undefined control sequence referring to a macro that I have triple-checked is correctly defined in the format macros.sty file inside this folder.
> 


I'm trying to understand exactly what you did here. The line

\usepackage{Bookmacros(2018)/formatstyle}

tells LaTeX to load the file formatstyle.sty in the subfolder Bookmacros(2018) of the current folder. When you say this points to a macro file macros.sty in that subfolder, do you mean that formatstyle.sty contains a \RequirePackage{macros} or a \usepackage{macros} or an \input{macros.sty}? If so, they would not be found unless you also included the path to them, as the search path for included files has at the top the current folder, and then goes through the tex/latex subfolders of your home texmf folders (typically, just ~/Library/texmf) before searching in texmf-local and, then the system owned texmf folders.

If I'm misunderstanding your setup, here's another approach. Copy your preamble to a new tex file, testA.tex, in the same folder as your master tex file, and make a trivial body, so the end testA.tex  would look like

\begin{document}
A
\end{document}

Prepend the line

% !TEX TS-program = pdflatexmk

and erase all line from the preamble (typically, those that load pstricks packages) that cannot run under pdflatex. 

Typeset the document and you should get a document named testA.fls which shows you the full path every file used in the processing.

Michael