[TxMt] Re: Latex-Bundle: Error by using "Insert label/citation based on current word"

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On Sep 11, 2008, at 5:41 PM, Jan Michael wrote:

> Many Thanks! But shouldn't this have worked without the symbolic link?

Yes and no. Frontends like Textmate don't go through the same  
initialization process as the shell does, so they don't get to know  
about the value of the PATH variable you see when you try a command  
in the shell. So for instance you can try the following and it will  
also work: Remove the symbolic link, close textmate, and on the  
terminal do "open -a TextMate". This will start TM as a child of the  
terminal, and hence inheriting the terminal's shell variables. It  
will then know about your PATH setting, and should be able to find  
tex just as you do from the terminal. But since TM is not run this  
way typically, it doesn't know about that.

So given that we can't rely on the shell variables for locating the  
tex installation, we rely on a series of heuristic checks. The first  
is looking for /usr/texbin, which has been now accepted as the  
location of the tex install by the mac community. By this I mean that  
the MacTeX installation creates the necessary symbolic link there,  
and other programs can rely on it being there for anyone installing  
TeX via MacTeX. That is why things were working for you earlier. When  
you did the migration though, none of the agents involved in the  
migration process knew about the symlink, so it was not created.

Now, returning to the issue at hand, once this link is not found some  
other things are tried. And I think was has changed in 10.5 is the  
message reported by the shell command used to check for kpsewhich in  
one of these steps. This command used to fail silently in 10.4, but  
not in 10.5. At least this is my conjecture. It is usually not an  
issue since for practically everyone the /usr/texbin part works  
already, and we don't even have to go into the heuristics. Most  
people who don't keep current with latex installs are probably also  
not keeping current with OS versions, so those that could have seen  
the problem if they moved to 10.5 are likely still in 10.4, and not  
seeing the problem (phew, that was a complicated one).

So anyway, that is probably a longer answer than what you bargained  
for, but there you have it.

> Cheers,
>
> 	Jan

Haris Skiadas
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hanover College