Urania

One of my favorite little programs is LaTeXit.  It allows you to typeset LaTeX equations outside of a text editor and then drag the results into programs like Keynote or Pages.  It was not fully compatible with Leopard and my fix was a kludge that could break other programs.  Pierre Chatelier has released updated LaTeXit to version 1.15.0, which restores Leopard compatibility.  Notably, you can now use the default0 /etc/profile file without fear.

[A better fix to this problem is to upgrade to LaTeXit 1.15, which was released on April 16, 2008.  It fixes the problems with Leopard and allows you to keep the default /etc/profile file for Leopard.]

Apparently, LaTeXIt, which I use to generate equations with Latex which can then be copied into Apple’s Keynote and Pages documents, locks up on launch a vanilla install of Leopard. This post on MacOSXHints.com provides a hack, but it wasn’t that nice, since it involves re-installing a particular version of latex. It turns out the solution was really much simpler and shows up in the comments on that page. In the comments, user Paolo Bosetti notes that

There is actually a much easier workaround: simply change your /etc/profile commenting the following lines (add the “#” at the begining):

# if [ -x /usr/libexec/path_helper ]; then
# eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`
# fi

and adding the following two:

PATH="/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin"
export PATH

Why so? Apple changed the Leopard way to set the PATH variable, and now it uses the /usr/libexec/path_helper command, which seems having troubles with LaTeXiT spawned bash scripts. If you make this modification to your /etc/profile, you are simply dropping the new path_helper in favour of the plain old way to set the PATH variable.

This also explains why I wasn’t seeing this on my laptop, since it kept the old /etc/profile file during the upgrade.

Another user comments that the fix could also be done without hacking the /etc/profile but instead just changing ~/.profile such that /opt/local/bin appears in the path last, since /usr/libexec/path_helper is supposed to read ~/.profile. However, I was unable to get this approach to work.

About 6 weeks ago I posted about the various ports that failed to install in my first attempts at getting “my standard suite” of ports installed under MacPorts on Leopard. My standard suite until Tiger involved issuing the following command:

sudo port install aquaterm chmdump contacts coreutils curl file findutils g95 ghostscript gv ImageMagick ksh93 latex2rtf lynx macutil osxutils plotutils subversion teTeX tidy vim wget wine xterm xephem

Since then MacPorts has released version 1.6 and the various porters have been hacking at the various problems. I can now report that of the ports I reported failed to install:

• xterm, wine, and g95 all now install without any issues.
• teTeX can be installed, there was a bad dependency in the portfile. You just needed to install openmotif first manually. I don’t know if the bad dependency is still there, it may have been resolved.
• subversion can be installed, it also had a bad dependency. You just needed to install nawk first. Again, I don’t know if the bad dependency is still there, it may have been resolved.
• gv can be installed if you apply a patch. If you check that bug ticket on gv (you need to get a free MacOSForge account), you will find a new patch-setenv.c file is available there. If you download that file and replace /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/print/gv/files/patch-setenv.c with it, gv will compile and install just fine.

This leaves just two of my standard suite of packages that don’t compile right in Leopard, osxutils (See this post) and xephem (See this post). And xephem installs just fine manually if you download the source code.

There are a wide variety of LaTeX front-ends out there. I recently discovered Texmaker and I like it a lot. It’s not quite Mac native, so the interface takes a little getting used to, but has a nice syntax-coloring editor, some latex-specific menu items for inserting symbols and math, and it is free. You can download it here, but I would recommend installing aspell (for spell checking) via macports instead of using fink.  

I haven’t played with this personally yet, but since I will be working on a paper for publication shortly, it looks like this might come in very handy. A Dr. Figueroa-Centeno in the Department of Mathematics in Hawai`i has posted instructions for getting the LaTeX syntax checker, ChkTeX, running under MacOS X. It doesn’t look terribly difficult. He includes instructions and a script for BBEdit integration, which makes me a happier BBEdit user. To quote from the ChkTeX website:

[ChkTeX] has been written in frustration because some constructs in LaTeX are sometimes non-intuitive, and easy to forget. It is not a replacement for the built-in checker in LaTeX; however it catches some typographic errors LaTeX oversees. In other words, it is Lint for LaTeX.

Looks promising for me. I use Splint when C programming (I installed splint via MacPorts using the command line sudo port install splint), so the idea of a Lint for LaTeX is appealing. I’ll be visiting Dr. Figueroa-Centeno’s website on ChkTeX on Mac OS X for full details on installing it, once I get a break from teaching.

NOTE: I will assume you have installed teTeX (a modern LaTeX package) in one of a variety of ways. Personally I recommend either Fink or MacPorts. However you can get a lot more information about this by visiting the “Getting Started” page at the Mac TeX website.

AASTeX is used to help typeset publications for all the major astronomical journals (at least in the US). You have two fundamental options for installing AASTeX on the Mac:

1. Single User Install: The easiest way is to download AASTeX (the version for LaTeX 2e) from http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AAS/AASTeX/ and then just copy the aastex.cls file to whatever directory contains your latex source code for your paper. It should work just fine if you do that.
2. Global Install: If you want to make the AASTeX class file available to all your Mac users, you need to install it globally where the laTeX installation keeps its latex libraries. The easiest way to do this is to first determine where teTeX keeps its laTeX libraries (referred to as TEXMFMAIN). One simple way to do this is to type the following from the command line
   

   texconfig conf | grep TEXMFMAIN

   
   Once you have found that directory, edit the Makefile that comes with AASTeX so that INSTALLDIR equals that directory and fire off a
   

   sudo make install

   
   Once you have installed AASTeX, run
   

   sudo texconfig rehash

   
   And you should be set.

P.S. - Most teTeX installs come set to European paper sizes. If you want US Letter size, just run the configuration program and set US Letter size pages as the default using:

sudo texconfig

Its text menu driven and pretty straight forward.