Hello Graham, On Sep 2, 2008, at 3:31 AM, Graham Smith wrote:
I have run pdflatex --shell-escape PDFPlotTrial2.tex from terminal (which seemed to work as I got pages of text appearing with no obvious error messages) and I have upgraded to version 2 of pgf. GNUPlot was installed with fink and runs OK from typing gnuplot in terminal.
I am now stuck, and no idea what to try next. I am pretty new to this so it could well be something so obvious that no one is suggesting it. Can anyone help.
Many thanks,
This is almost certainly a path issue. First off, open the file again in TextMate, and press "opt-cmd-," which opens up the LaTeX preferences. Then click on the "Verbose TeX output" option, and type "-shell-escape" without the quotes in the Options box. Then close the window and compile again. This should show you the entire log file, and right before the first error you should be seeing the line: sh: line 1: gnuplot: command not found
If this is indeed the case, then the problem is simple. Fink changes the shell files that run when you start a new terminal, in order to place its directory there. You can see that by typing "echo $PATH" on a terminal window. TextMate does not get to use these path settings, because it inherits its shell from the login process. The consequence of that is that when pdflatex is executed from within Textmate, it really doesn't know about Fink and where to find it. There are numerous solutions to this problem:
First off, close TextMate completely, then go to the terminal, and type "open -a TextMate". This should start TextMate for you, but now TextMate is inheriting the path from the terminal, and this should recognize Fink. If you now open your file in TextMate and compile, it should work. Of course, this requires starting TextMate this way every time.
There are other solutions, each with its slight drawbacks, but let's first make sure the above solution correctly identifies the problem, and then we can take it from there. In brief, some of those solutions would be:
a) add a PATH variable in the TextMate general preferences, which echoes the path from the terminal. Pretty safe if you don't change that path often. b) Create a symbolic link to gnuplot from a location that is searched anyway, like for instance /usr/local/bin. You can get the full path to gnuplot by typing "which gnuplot" on the terminal. Should work if gnuplot doesn't have any dependencies on other parts of fink. c) As Alain suggested, compile gnuplot from scratch. This would place it in a location that is searched for anyway.
Graham
Haris Skiadas Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Hanover College