Can't run MacTeX from command line

[Richard Koch]

Stephen,

In your message, you quote our documentation as recommending TeX Live Utility
and the menu item "Reconfigure Distribution". The actual menu is
"Change Default TeX Live Version." A moment ago,  I discovered that the MacTeX install
page claims it is "Select Default TeX Live Version." I just fixed that.

I cannot find "Reconfigure Distribution" in our web pages. If it is there, could you
please write me a note telling where and I'll fix it.

--------------

MacTeX is mainly about making TeX easy to use on the Mac for people unfamiliar with
Unix. If you run from the command line, you may have to modify features, but that should
be very easy using the following facts:

1) We install TeX Live itself completely unmodified. The distribution you have in

/usr/local/texlive/2023

is exactly what you would get by installing using the Unix install script.

2) MacTeX also creates a symbolic link /Library/TeX/texbin pointing indirectly to the
TeX Binaries. All of our GUI programs use this link. Your shell may or may not
have been automatically configured to use it depending on how that shell sets
up path. Check your PATH to see. Since you don't complain about typesetting,
I suspect /Library/TeX/texbin is in your path.

3) If you use /Library/TeX/texbin in your path, then switching distributions with
TeX Live Utility will automatically switch the link and thus work fine from the
command line.

4) We generally do not recommend adding environment variables. Such variables
are recognized by TeX Live, of course, but nothing extraneous added by MacTeX
will use them.

Richard Koch




On Jul 1, 2023, at 1:39 AM, Stephen Cox <stephenjcox3 at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

Just installed TeX Live on MacBook running Ventura 13.4.1

Seems to work fine from the Tex Live app but I can’t make it work from the command line (which I prefer to use) despite doing:

MANPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2023/texmf-dist/doc/man:$MANPATH; export MANPATH
INFOPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2023/texmf-dist/doc/info:$INFOPATH; export INFOPATH

and confirming that these environment variables are defined as above.

>> echo $MANPATH
/usr/local/texlive/2023/texmf-dist/doc/man:
>> echo $INFOPATH
/usr/local/texlive/2023/texmf-dist/doc/info:


The documentation stated:
You can switch back and forth between TEX Live 2023 and your old distribution by using the program TeX Live Utility in /Applications/TeX. Run this program and select the menu item “Reconfigure Distributions...” in the Configure menu.

But the menu item ‘Reconfigure Distributions’ does not appear in the app.



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