[OS X TeX] TeXLive issue

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 9 mai 07 à 22:00, Alan Litchfield a écrit :

> I installed, and I assumed from Herb's question what he meant, from  
> the command line with ./install-tl.sh. Means I need to manually  
> update the path in TeXShop and $PATH because the install directory  
> changes with every new release.
>
> This is the way normally do it since I use a number of different  
> platforms (MacOS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows,...), so the only  
> variation to the pattern is Windows.

I do not think installing using MacTeX would break cross-platform  
compatibility: AFAIK MacTeX installs a complete standard TeX Live  
2007, only adding bits to it to make it more Mac-like.

By this I mean you've got a fairly standard TeX Live installed  
inside /usr/local/texlive/2007/, and an empty skeletal directory /usr/ 
local/texlive/texmf-local for you to put local system-wide additions.  
The only bit that is probably non-standard is texmf.cnf, which may  
differ from that in standard TeX Live.

In addition to that, a so-called TeXDist structure (created by Gerben  
Wierda and Jérôme Laurens, with input from Dick Koch) is created  
inside /Library/TeX. It makes access to the various bits of the  
various texmf trees easier, and creates a symlink /usr/texbin  
pointing to the directory containing the binaries of the currently  
active TeX distribution (either TeXLive 2007, or TeXLive 2005, or  
gwTeX, or teTeX) for your processor (either PowerPC or Intel).

Second addition: /etc/profile, /etc/csh.login and /usr/share/misc/ 
man.conf are modified so that /usr/texbin is added to $PATH, and the  
man directory of the currently active TeX distro is also added to  
$MANPATH.

Finally by default some other command-line utilities are installed  
(GhostScript, FontForge, Fondu, ImageMagick, Freetype), together with  
some GUI applications (TeXShop, BibDesk, Excalibur, i-Installer). The  
exact list of what gets installed and where is at:

<http://www.tug.org/mactex/whatgetsinstalledwhere.html>

Of course, you can personalize that at install time to select whether  
or not to install these additions.

Should you decide to give MacTeX a try, then you can either use the  
all-in-one installer MacTeX.dmg available at:

<http://www.tug.org/mactex/>

or use the dedicated installers available at:

<http://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html>

Namely: the TeX distro itself (without the GUI applications) in  
either of three incarnations:

texlive-2007-dev.dmg: the latest TeXLive
gwtex.dmg: Gerben Wierda's TeX distro
tetex.dmg: the obsolete teTeX

plus the GUI applications themselves:

mactex-additions.dmg

Hope this clarifies things a bit,

Bruno
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