[R-SIG-Mac] building a package on a Mac: pdflatex

[Federico Calboli]

On 5 Jul 2011, at 14:48, David Winsemius wrote:

> On Jul 5, 2011, at 9:10 AM, Federico Calboli wrote:
> 
>> Simon,
>> 
>>> both are entirely irrelevant - run
>>> system("pdflatex --version")
>>> in R - that is the only thing that counts. If it shows an error, then you don't have pdflatex on your PATH which would be the problem. As a side note, you are showing two separate TeX packages which may not help you to find out what breaks in your setup in general ...
>> 
>> 
>> thanks for the hint. Unfortunately:
>> 
>> system("pdflatex --version")
>> /bin/sh: pdflatex: command not found
>> 
>> doing a simple
>> 
>> PATH=$PATH:/user/texbin
>> 
>> fixed it if I use R and package.skeleton() from the terminal. If I use the R gui (from the standard R 2.13.0 CRAN download) it still does not find pdflatex and does not build a usable package skeleton.
>> 
>> In any case, your hit solved my issue. Now, how do I set the path for the R gui?
>> 
> 
> When the answer to this is posted, I am wondering if it could be put in the Mac R FAQ because it seems that I have read several questions of late that involve users puzzling where to set various paths for Finder,  bash, and R that are stored in different places/environments. It would be good not to need to search for a r-sig-mac posting but rather refer to a "central document".


As a matter of completeness, PATH=$PATH:/user/texbin did not alter my path 'globally', and immediately broke in a new terminal tab.  

I solved the issue globally with

sudo sh -c 'echo "/usr/texbin">>/etc/paths.d/texbin' [the reader should be warned I use bash by default on my terminal]

which does work if I use R in a terminal and I call system('pdflatex --version'). This solution also allowed a perfectly clean R CMD check.

On the other hand, from the GUI [R.app GUI 1.40 (5751) x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0], 

> system("pdflatex --version")
/bin/sh: pdflatex: command not found

bw

F





Federico C. F. Calboli
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Imperial College, St. Mary's Campus
Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG

Tel +44 (0)20 75941602   Fax +44 (0)20 75943193

f.calboli [.a.t] imperial.ac.uk
f.calboli [.a.t] gmail.com