MacTeX in Pretest?

[Bruno Voisin]

> Fr. Samuel Springuel wrote:
> 
> 
> Am I missing something in what I should be doing to find MacTeX for the pretest?


No, you've not missed anything. A functional TeX Live package has been built (by Dick Koch, who does all the work), but the final step before MacTeX distribution, namely notarization which requires upload to Apple's servers, takes literally hours. This has been put on hold until:

(1) A fully functional ConTeXt setup has been included in TL 2025. (This may be resolved already, I haven't checked.)

(2) The current pdfTeX situation is resolved: either the serious pdfTeX bug reported on this list is fixed, or the change causing the bug is reversed.

For the moment, you can get a functional MacTeX 2025 setup (apart from the pdfTeX bug) as follows:


- Install TeX Live 2025 the Unix way: download install-tl-unx.tar.gz from one of the pretest servers, extract the archive, cd inside it then run (for example)

	sudo ./install-tl -repository https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tlpretest/ -gui text

This may take several hours depending on your choice of server and how busy the server is (the script downloads over 4000 packages one by one).


- Download the 2024 postinstall script referenced at

	https://tug.org/mactex/mactex-unix-download.html

namely

	https://tug.org/mactex/postinstall2024.sh

change every occurrence of "2024" inside it to "2025", run it, say

	sudo sh postinstall2025.sh

The creates the TeXDist structure, allowing the GUI applications to find TeX and adding TeX and friends to PATH. For convenience the script is attached.


- Install the GUI applications themselves using

	mactex-guiapplications-20250210.pkg

and also the Ghostscript packages

	mactex-ghostscript-10.04.0-20250210.pkg
	mactex-ghostscript-10.04.0-extras-20250210.pkg

(the second only if you use dvisvgm).


- To make sure everything is set up as it should, open TeX Live Utility, go to Configure > Manage Repositories, add your pretest server of choice in My Repositories, like in the screenshot below, set it up as Home, and check also in Configure > Change Default TeX Live Version that TeXLive-2025 is selected.


In this way you get separately the various pieces that make the monolithic MacTeX package. This is how I put together my current MacTeX 2025 pretest setup, which works (apart from pdfTeX).

Hope this helps,

Bruno Voisin


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