Re: [R-SIG-Mac] checking for pdflatex

Prof Brian Ripley Mon, 16 Mar 2015 13:00:13 -0700

Note that it not just MacTex which uses /usr/texbin. /usr/texbin is alink to /Library/TeX/Distributions/Programs/texbin which is an/etc/alternatives scheme to manage multiple TeX distributions which used(prior to Yosemite, at least) to be controlled by a Systems Preferenceswidget. See https://tug.org/mactex/multipletexdistributions.html .

That does not apply to e.g. Fink or MacPorts distributions of TeX, butpeople using those are not likely to be using R.app.

/usr/libexec/path_helper is not the whole story either: it reads systemversions of PATH which might not apply to a user's shell: it does notget my settings completely correct (in particular it has /usr/texbin toofar down the PATH and I had moved it because the system path found thewrong 'makeindex').



On 16/03/2015 18:44, John Fox wrote:

Dear Berend and Simon,

I've now tried Berend's solution and it appears to work fine: If necessary, I 
add /usr/texbin to the path when the Rcmdr GUI starts up and restore the path 
to its previous state when it closes.

I agree that Simon's solution will be more flexible since it should work if 
pdflatex is located elsewhere (as long as it's on the path reported by 
path_helper), and I'll give that a try as well.

Thanks again for all the help,
  John

-----Original Message-----
From: Berend Hasselman [mailto:b...@xs4all.nl]
Sent: March-16-15 2:34 PM
To: j...@mcmaster.ca
Cc: Simon Urbanek; r-sig-mac@r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R-SIG-Mac] checking for pdflatex

John,

On 16-03-2015, at 18:53, John Fox <j...@mcmaster.ca> wrote:

Dear Berend,
….


For what it’s worth: I have the following code in the .First function in
~/.Rprofile:
(R 3.1.3 on OS X Yosemite)

    if( .Platform$GUI == "AQUA" ) {
        # this appends /usr/local/bin to what is already in PATH
        # by default this is already in PATH (at least in 10.6.8)
        # so remove any duplicated items
        z <- Sys.getenv("PATH")
        z <- unlist(strsplit(z,.Platform$path.sep,fixed=TRUE))
        # add path to MacTeX executables for OS X Yosemite (which has a

bug)

        # in Terminal it is added automatically
        z[length(z)+1] <- "/usr/texbin"

Sys.setenv(PATH=paste(z[!duplicated(z)],collapse=.Platform$path.sep))


This should work fine if pdflatex is in /usr/texbin, which I now understand is

by far the most common case (and is the case on my Mac).


Do you mind if I adapt your code for the Rcmdr? I can fix the path in this

manner at startup of the Rcmdr GUI and restore it to its initial value on exit
from the GUI.


Go right ahead. Don’t forget it assumes MacTeX.

But do also have a look Simon’s suggestion of using path_helper, which
seems more flexible than my solution:

I tried this in R-GUI

system2("/usr/libexec/path_helper","-s", stdout=TRUE)

and got this answer

[1]
"PATH=\"/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/texbi
n\"; export PATH;”

which will have to be fiddled with to get something that is usable.

Berend

Thanks for this,
John


Berend



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--
Brian D. Ripley,                  rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK

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