[R-SIG-Mac] checking for pdflatex

[Simon Urbanek]

> On Mar 16, 2015, at 12:25 PM, John Fox <jfox at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> 
> Dear Simon,
> 
> Thanks for this, and to the others who responded to my question. The FAQ and Matt Denwood's response jogged my memory, and reminded me that I encountered this problem before.
> 
> In this case, I don't see a good solution, but I'll think about the problem some more.
> 
> Without providing too many tedious details, the development version of the Rcmdr package checks at startup what resources are available to it, including pdflatex, and configures itself accordingly. Having inexperienced users edit, e.g., their .Renviron files is probably a non-starter. The Rcmdr could offer to do this at the user's option (it already provides dialogs that guide the user to locations of missing software like LaTeX and pandoc), but I'd still have to be able to figure out whether pdflatex is available and if so where it's located.
> 
> Ian Gow suggested using locate, but I apparently can't rely on a locate database having been compiled -- it wasn't on my Mac -- and the overhead of compiling the locate db is excessive for a start-up check.
> 

Apple maintains a database of installed software in the system - see pkgutil. The trouble is that the add-on projects like MacPort or brew ignore it completely and don't register with it. As Gabor pointed out there is essentially only one player in the field - MacTeX and it does register.

Anyway, if you want to retrieve the PATH used by shells, you can try

/usr/libexec/path_helper -s

which gives the corresponding entry for bash-like shells.

Cheers,
Simon



> Again, thanks for explaining the problem.
> 
> John
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Simon Urbanek [mailto:simon.urbanek at r-project.org]
>> Sent: March-16-15 10:39 AM
>> To: John Fox
>> Cc: Ian Gow; r-sig-mac at r-project.org
>> Subject: Re: [R-SIG-Mac] checking for pdflatex
>> 
>> John,
>> 
>> see R for Mac FAQ 10.13: I get “command not found” in the GUI yet it works
>> in the Terminal – why?
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Simon
>> 
>> 
>>> On Mar 15, 2015, at 6:21 PM, John Fox <jfox at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Dear Ian,
>>> 
>>> Thanks for this. Please see below:
>>> 
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Ian Gow [mailto:iandgow at gmail.com]
>>>> Sent: March-15-15 5:07 PM
>>>> To: John Fox
>>>> Cc: r-sig-mac at r-project.org
>>>> Subject: Re: [R-SIG-Mac] checking for pdflatex
>>>> 
>>>> 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.
>>> 
>>> Yes, I understand that, though I don't understand why there's a
>>> difference in the path.
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> 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"
>>> 
>>> The problem for me is to determine whether pdflatex is installed
>>> *without* knowing in advance where it's installed. I haven't described
>>> the purpose of this, and, in the interest of brevity, won't for the
>>> time-being, but it may also prove necessary to determine where pdflatex
>> resides.
>>> 
>>> Best,
>>> John
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 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/
>>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> R-SIG-Mac mailing list
>>>>> R-SIG-Mac at r-project.org
>>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>>> 
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