[OS X TeX] altpdflatex - back compatibility please

[Herbert Schulz]

On Oct 11, 2005, at 11:53 AM, Jung-Tsung Shen wrote:

>
> My confusion is: the MacTeX 2005 is clearly targeted towards new
> users. For us, the people having been using LaTeX, however, should we
> `upgrade' or not? What do we gain to upgrade? What don't we lose to
> upgrade? Is there any readable document, in the language for people in
> my group, instructs how to do it?
>

Howdy,

The TL2005 update has updated packages, etc., so it will be good to  
update. For someone that doesn't want to have to ``fix things up''  
during the transition period I'd wait a short while. I think that  
when the next version of TeXShop comes out and you check it out  
everything else will be stable enough so updating will go smoothly.  
If things are working for you now there is no reason to rush in until  
the dust settles.

> Another thing I'd like to advocate when I am still on the whining
> stage: the experienced users might underestimate the importance, the
> friendness, and the convenience having a good package manager like the
> one in MikTeX. The package manager is, according to my very limited
> observations, very important to new users. No matter how complete
> MacTeX is, it's unlikely that it includes all packages. The package
> manager takes care of those things for the novice.
>
> JT

You might want to look into the TCOBrowser. It has the ability to  
download and expand MikTeX packages. It is even possible to set  
things up so that new packages get installed in your personal texmf  
tree (~/Library/texmf/) so they should just work; I haven't tried  
that --- I have it set to expand onto my desktop.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest.com)


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