[R-SIG-Mac] checking for pdflatex

[Ian Gow]

I think it's driven by the PATH variable, which appears to differ for me 
between RStudio and R from Terminal on the one hand and R.app on the 
other.

> Sys.getenv("PATH")
[1] "/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin"
> Sys.which("pdflatex")
pdflatex
       ""

If I add

Sys.setenv(PATH=paste(Sys.getenv("PATH"),"/opt/local/bin", sep=":"))

to ~/.Rprofile then R.app finds pdflatex (from MacPorts in my case).

> Sys.which("pdflatex")
                  pdflatex
"/opt/local/bin/pdflatex"
> Sys.getenv("PATH")
[1] "/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/local/bin"


On 15 Mar 2015, at 16:46, John Fox wrote:

> Dear list members,
>
> I need to determine whether pdflatex is installed and have been doing 
> that via Sys.which("pdflatex"). This works when R is run in a terminal 
> window (or in RStudio):
>
> > Sys.which("pdflatex")
>            pdflatex
> "/usr/texbin/pdflatex"
>
> but not from R.app:
>
> > Sys.which("pdflatex")
> pdflatex
>    ""
>
> The session info is the same in both cases:
>
> -------------- snip ----------------
>
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 3.1.3 (2015-03-09)
> Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
> Running under: OS X 10.10.2 (Yosemite)
>
> locale:
> [1] en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8/C/en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>
> -------------- snip ----------------
>
> Why is the result different? Is there a better way to check for the 
> presence of pdflatex?
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> John
>
> ------------------------------------------------
> John Fox, Professor
> McMaster University
> Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
> http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/
>
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