[R-SIG-Mac] checking for pdflatex

[Berend Hasselman]

John,

> On 16-03-2015, at 18:53, John Fox <jfox at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> 
> Dear Berend,
> ….
>> 
>> For what it’s worth: I have the following code in the .First function in
>> ~/.Rprofile:
>> (R 3.1.3 on OS X Yosemite)
>> 
>>    if( .Platform$GUI == "AQUA" ) {
>>        # this appends /usr/local/bin to what is already in PATH
>>        # by default this is already in PATH (at least in 10.6.8)
>>        # so remove any duplicated items
>>        z <- Sys.getenv("PATH")
>>        z <- unlist(strsplit(z,.Platform$path.sep,fixed=TRUE))
>>        # add path to MacTeX executables for OS X Yosemite (which has a bug)
>>        # in Terminal it is added automatically
>>        z[length(z)+1] <- "/usr/texbin"
>>        Sys.setenv(PATH=paste(z[!duplicated(z)],collapse=.Platform$path.sep))
>>    }
> 
> This should work fine if pdflatex is in /usr/texbin, which I now understand is by far the most common case (and is the case on my Mac).
> 
> Do you mind if I adapt your code for the Rcmdr? I can fix the path in this manner at startup of the Rcmdr GUI and restore it to its initial value on exit from the GUI.
> 

Go right ahead. Don’t forget it assumes MacTeX.

But do also have a look Simon’s suggestion of using path_helper, which seems more flexible than my solution:

I tried this in R-GUI

system2("/usr/libexec/path_helper","-s", stdout=TRUE)

and got this answer

[1] "PATH=\"/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/texbin\"; export PATH;”

which will have to be fiddled with to get something that is usable. 

Berend


> Thanks for this,
> John
> 
>> 
>> Berend
> 
> 
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