[R] Running LaTeX dvi previewer on MacOS X

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On Feb 29, 2008, at 5:39 PM, Michael wrote:

> On 29 Feb 2008, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
>
>> On Feb 29, 2008, at 12:38 PM, Michael wrote:
>
>>> On 29 Feb 2008, Frank E. Harrell, Jr. wrote:
>>>
>>>> Several people have given great advice on how to successfully use
>>>> X11 on
>>>> Mac to so we can use the dvi previewer to view latex() output from
>>>> Hmisc.  Now after a version upgrade of X11 and X11sdk we are  
>>>> getting
>>>> lots of crashes.  I noticed a Mac dvi previewer with an executable
>>>> stored as /Applications/TeX/TeXShop.app/Contents/MacOS/TeXShop
>>>>
>>>> Can we bypass X11 problems and point Hmisc to this executable  
>>>> for dvi
>>>> viewing?
>>>
>>> I think TeXshop converts dvi to pdf (something like dvips ->  
>>> ps2pdf) for
>>> viewing. Why not just use pdf for Mac?  Preview.app on Leopard  
>>> does do
>>> live updating.
>
>> And Skim.app does updating on Tiger, and is IMHO much better to
>> Preview.app in other ways (works with pdfsync for instance, allows
>> syncing back and forth between the pdf file and the corresponding tex
>> source)
>
> We were not talking about using TeXshop to edit LaTeX files.   
> Rather the
> latex() function Hmisc generates a dvi file and the question is how  
> to view
> it since Mac does not have native dvi viewer (other than xdvi).   
> The pdfsync
> function of Skim or TeXshop is irrelevant.

Why is it important that the output file be a dvi file? Would it be a  
problem to have the latex() function produce a pdf file on mac systems?
I thought the latex() command was just producing tex code.

> Michael

Haris Skiadas
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hanover College