On Oct 31, 2006, at 4:06 AM, Enrico Forestieri wrote:
Paul A. Rubin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
I'm posting this vicariously, as it were (not being a Mac user
myself),
so please bear with me. Someone else is having a problem with LyX
1.4.3/Mac OSX/teTeX (installed via fink). At least part of the
problem
seems to be caused by instant preview. With IP on and math insets in
the document, misadventures occur, and in particular the temp
directory
shows 0lyxpreview.tex, 0lyxpreview.aux, 0lyxpreview.pdf but not
0lyxpreview.dvi.
The user seems to think that /sw/bin/latex is symlinked (or hard
linked,
I'm not sure) to pdflatex. I'm guessing from the symptoms above that
when the Python script that compiles the previews runs what it
thinks is
latex, it's actually running pdflatex (or pdfetex with the format
set to
pdflatex, or something like that). Hence no DVI output, and the
DVI to
PNG conversion unsurprisingly breaks.
Does this resonate with any Mac users? Is there something
installation-wise that could get 'latex' to actually run latex (as in
producing DVI output without additional tweaking)?
Hi Paul,
I don't think that the sym- or hardlink to pdftex is the culprit here.
In most modern TeX implementations the engine is pdftex, anyway. If
you
have MikTeX 2.5 try "latex --version" and see that you are really
using
pdfetex. The engine looks at the name it was invoked and produces
output accordingly. So, symlinking latex to pdftex but invoking it as
"latex" gives you dvi output.
Instead, make sure that the command used by LyX to invoke latex is
really
"latex" and not "pdflatex".
Yes - in fact, you can invoke "latex -> dvi" conversion of a file
file.tex by typing, e.g.,
pdflatex -progname=latex file
pdfetex -progname=latex file
If it's not the preamble that's causing the problem, one might want
to add that option -progname=latex to the script (this will only work
if there's nothing in the preamble that overrides this progname
choice). I think this once worked for someone when I suggested it on
the MacTex mailing list... although it really should be handled
automatically, as Enrico said.
So before doing that, maybe one other suggestion: see (with ls -al)
if there are any texmf configuration files in your home directory
(.texmf-config etc) and move them out of the way.
Finally, you could also specify
pdflatex -output-format=dvi
to get dvi output. This is not quite equivalent (because it may load
different font files) to the -progname option, but it works for me, too.
Jens
