On Nov 22, 2006, at 12:19 PM, Mark Eli Kalderon wrote:

Not sure if this has anything to do with the recent update, but the bibliography completion command seems to be broken. Neither the key command nor calling it from the LaTeX bundle menu seems to work. Pretty sure that I haven't done anything to break it since I have been too busy to play with TM lately ;). Best, Mark

I made a change that was essential, because I was using a heuristic that was wrong. The problem is the following:

(This is a bit long an technical. If you get lost, make sure to read toward the end, for what you have to do to fix this).

The LaTeX installer needs to alter the PATH variable, by appending the correct path to the LaTeX executables, like for instance kpsewhich, which is the program used in these completion commands. The main question now is where this change in the PATH will take place. The i-installer changes /etc/profile in order to do that, with something like:

if [ `whoami` != "root" ] then PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current" export PATH fi

Now, the problem is that /etc/profile only gets executed when a shell is loaded, like when you open a Terminal window. Hence, when working from the command line, the value of the PATH variable, which you can see by doing something like "echo $PATH", would be something like:

/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple- darwin-current:/usr/local/bin

Or some small variation of it. This way, all LaTeX commands executed from the command line get to use this path.

Now comes the tricky part, in that all GUI applications, TexShop and TextMate included, don't get to use anything set in /etc/profile, so they don't get to use the above path by default, but rather the path that exists at login time, which is just: /bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

This is why the executables in TeXShop need to be specified with their full path, instead of just the executable name. In TextMate, you don't see the same problem when executing the LaTeX & View command, because of some TextMate technicalities: That command does not start with a shebang (#!), and so is a plain shell script, but with one important difference: TextMate does a lot of initial work setting things up for this script. Among those things is taking care of using the things defined in /etc/profile. However, for all commands that use a shebang, in particular all Ruby commands that need the shebang to tell TextMate to use the Ruby interpreter (with a line like #!/usr/bin/env ruby), this extra work does not take place. This may change in future version of TextMate, but it is how things are atm.

Which brings us to the two completion commands, bibliography completion, and label completion. They both need to somehow find this path out. It is a bad idea to just execute /etc/profile within the script, because /etc/profile might be doing all sorts of other things as well, that might have unfortunate side-effects. The workaround I had put in place was to use the command line tool "locate" to find the path to kpsewhich. This was a horrible idea in the case of multiple TeX installs, in particular if there are both intel and ppc binaries. So I removed this check, which exposed the previous problem.

(Here is where you should start reading again if you skipped some of the above)

The fix is the following: You need to edit a file called ~/.MacOSX/ environment.plist and to add the full path there. This is a file that is used by all GUI apps, and you can set there values for environment variables that you want all GUI apps to use. In particular we will want to add the current path to this file. Start by going to the terminal and running:

echo $PATH

The result you see printed out is the path we want to use, so select it and copy. Then see if you have a file called ~/.MacOSX/ environment.plist. For that, again in the command line, you would do:

ls ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist

And if you get something back, then you have the file.

In either case, you should open this file for editing in TextMate. If you have already installed the command line tool "mate" (Found in TextMate under Help -> Terminal Usage…, I strongly recommend doing this), then you would at this point do:

mate ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist

This will open this file in TextMate for editing, or create a new file if there isn't such a file. If this is a new file, then make its contents be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http:// www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>PATH</key> <string>/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc- apple-darwin-current</string> </dict> </plist>

where instead of /bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/teTeX/bin/ powerpc-apple-darwin-current you should paste whatever value you copied, that you got from the "echo $PATH"

If you already have such a file, then you need to add the pair:

<key>PATH</key> <string>/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc- apple-darwin-current</string>

So what all this does is it sets the value for the PATH variable in a place that all GUI apps can use. If you later install a different LaTeX version, then you will need to change this file again.

After saving this file and restarting TM, things should start working out. You may need to log out and back in, though I don't think so. Let me know if you still have problems.

Haris