** Uninstalling the MacTeX Distribution **

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Uninstalling MacTeX-2007

The Apple Installer does not support uninstalling files. Hence, if you install MacTeX-2007 and then want to get rid of everything, your task may be easy or difficult depending on what you installed.

• The GUI Applications portion of the install package places BibDesk, Excalibur, LaTeXiT, TeXShop, and a README file in /Applications/TeX, and places i-Installer in /Applications/Utilities. Each can be uninstalled by just dragging to the trash.

• The Font Utilities, Ghostscript, and ImageMagick portions are the most difficult to uninstall because each contains files placed in various subfolders of /usr/local. For example, Ghostscript installs files in /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/man, and /usr/local/share/ghostscript.

  On the other hand, these packages are the least important for TeX users.

  Font utilties are seldom used unless you want to use Mac fonts in TeX without using XeTeX.

  Ghostscript can mostly be replaced by Apple's built-in distiller; the exception is the package epstopdf for converting eps files automatically to pdf format during typesetting with pdflatex.

  ImageMagick is used to convert tif files to png files automatically during typesetting with pdflatex.

  Hence a user concerned about uninstalling might decide to avoid these three packages.
  
  Uninstalling the packages with i-Installer:

  The three packages are most easily removed using i-Installer, which MacTeX installs in /Applications/Utilities. That is because these packages come directly from Gerben Wierda's distribution.
  

  To remove Ghostscript, open i-Installer, click on the "i-Package" menu, and select "Known Packages i-Directory". In the resulting panel, click on "Ghostscript 8". A new panel will open; select "Uninstall.
  
  To remove ImageMagick, follow the same procedure, removing "Freetype 2", "libwmf (Conversion Support Library)", and "ImageMagick." To remove Font Utilities, remove "GNU gettext libraries," "FontForge", and "Fondu Mac Font cli Tools".

  
  Uninstalling Manually:

  Users who prefer finer control over this process should note that Apple's installer has a menu command File/Show Files which shows the location of all files installed by the package. If you installed one of the three packages just mentioned, use this command to list installed files and remove them by hand.

  
  

• The TeX distribution is much easier to uninstall. TeXLive-2007 is placed in /usr/local/texlive, with the majority of the distribution going to /usr/local/texlive/2007. To remove this portion, use the commands

  sudo bash

  rm -R /usr/local/texlive/2007

  Replace "/usr/local/texlive/2007" by "/usr/local/texlive" to remove distributions for other years and remove any local additions placed in /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local.

  This step will automatically disconnect the TeXDist data structure, so it is not necessary to clean up this structure.

• The TeXDist data structure is in /Library/TeX, but this data takes up little space. The data structure contains stubs for TeX distributions which may or may not be installed. So, for example, removing TeXLive-2007 while leaving its data stub will cause no trouble. The location /Library/TeX is used by other TeX programs unrelated to MacTeX, so removing this location is not a good idea unless you are abandoning TeX completely.

• The TeX Distribution preference pane is in /Library/PreferencePanes and the following commands will remove it:

  sudo bash

  rm -R /Library/PreferencePanes/TeXDistPrefPane.prefPane