[OS X TeX] Re: Newbie is confused by Getting Started document

[Bob Harris]

I wrote:
>> Though I haven't tried them out yet, those commands (latex, dvips, and
>> ps2pdf) are all available on the command line without me installing
>> anything.

To which Piet van Oostrum replied:
> I can't believe that. OS X doesn't come with LaTeX installed, so these
> commands will not be available unless you install LaTeX. Or maybe you have
> already installed it in the past?

Interesting.  That would explain why they are not mentioned on the
getting started page at Gary and Joseph's site.

I know that I did not *intentionally* install them on this machine.
They must have come into my machine as part of another install,
through either fink, darwinports, a python egg dependency, or who
knows what.  The machine is now over two years old and I have
successfully installed several packages (and been unsuccessful with
several others).

In fact, with a little snooping it appears like this may have come in
during my failed attempts to install rpy about a year ago.  I draw
that conclusion from the mod date on the latex and dvips binaries
being Jan/18/06 and the fact that I have notes that say I tried to
install rpy on Jan/14 (and I recall I wasted several evenings trying
to get rpy to install correctly before I gave up).  Looks like I have
teTex too, version 3.0_1.

So thanks for pointing out the incongruity of what I wrote.  I didn't
realize I'd already installed anything tex related on this machine.  I
now see that those commands *don't* exist on my laptop, so they
weren't part of the original MacOSX distribution.  I didn't think to
check that last night.

Bob H

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