On 06/20/2013 08:49 PM, Alvin Revzin wrote: > Unlike previous versions, Scribus 1.4.2 works well on my Mac Mini with > OSX-10.8.4 but if and only if Ghostscript and Scribus are in the Applications > folder. > There is one major problem, though. If I try to insert a render frame into a > document, I get an error message that says "The application "pdflatex > --nonstopmode" failed to start. Please check the path:" and then nothing > further. > > This message makes no sense as there is no way to check the - unspecified - > path. > Also, IIRC, many years ago there was a "pdflatex" in the usual MacTeX > distribution but it is nothing like it is in my current (2012) distribution > (also in the Applications folder). > > Is this soluble or is it JAMI (Just Another Mac Incompatibility? > > It's probably soluble, which doesn't necessarily mean it's quick and easy. I just happened to have a tex/latex/pdflatex-free computer that I could put to the test. After about an hour or so I finally got it working. This is on Fedora 18, so you'll have to translate for MacTex by googling. latex/pdflatex is driven in Fedora by texlive, which is more individual packages than anyone probably needs. Let's say at the outset that the messages you get from the render frame are not very helpful but may give some fodder for Google.
I started out by running 'yum install texlive-pdflatex*, which got me a number of parts of the texlive distribution, but not enough. I can recall in the past that one of the stumbling blocks in this was texlive-extsizes, but this wasn't enough either. There was advice I could find about running 'texlive-config rehash' but this never helped. Finally, I realized that Fedora has a package simply called 'texlive', which by running 'yum install texlive' gave me quite a long list of dependencies, which included texlive-cm and texlive-cm-super, one or the other of which seems to be key in running the render frame script, since it uses CM fonts. I could have run 'yum install texlive*' I suppose, but I was trying to understand why the render frame was failing with something less than a battleship. So in the end you should be able to solve this, but it's dependent on learning about how to install the parts of MacTex you need. I would add that I never had this problem before Fedora 18, so I think it's due to a major restructuring of Tex. The push seems to be toward using luatex and pdfluatex, but so far I can't get the gist of luatex. The main thing I know about luatex is that all my latex files won't convert using it. Greg
