Useful Sticky Notes

Monday, January 26, 2015

Mac OS X Latex Support on Yosemite

I had not intended to jump the gun on documenting Latex over the various other overall stages of my attempt to set up a coherent development environment on a fresh Yosemite machine ... but my preference is to get the documentation down, and properly linked against my master software list first. So here goes.

I recalled a great deal of pain when I used Homebrew to install tex-live on my MacBook Pro. Sadly, I do not recall what it was … it was one of those pain-once forget-later scenarios I am determined to eliminate when setting up my development environment on my Yosemite machine.

This online article sums it up (amongst others which basically said the same thing about latex and homebrew): http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/97183/what-are-the-practical-differences-between-installing-latex-from-mactex-or-macpo

The key takeaway was this article linked in the above:

and the comment from the homebrew people themselves:

“Installing TeX from source is weird and gross, requires a lot of patches,
and only builds 32-bit (and thus can't use Homebrew deps on Snow Leopard.)

We recommend using a MacTeX distribution: http://www.tug.org/mactex/

However, there seems to be hope in the form of MacTex being available via a Homebrew cask - brew cask install mactex

This process has a caveat however:

Arya:~ cheelee$ brew cask install mactex
==> Caveats
To use mactex, zsh users may need to add the following line to their
~/.zprofile.  (Among other effects, /usr/texbin will be added to the
PATH environment variable):

 eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`

Finally, mactex installs its binaries (pdflatex is now a default symlink to pdftex as a convenience) in /usr/texbin. To re-create the command-line interface I am familiar with, with access to such tools as pdflatex, bibtex, etc ... I needed to create an environment module for mactex/2014 to be loaded with my bash shell as a default (see http://cwleehpc.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-modules-environment-on-mac-os-x.html).

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