loss of pdflatex

Ryan Schmidt ryandesign at macports.org
Fri Sep 17 14:27:30 PDT 2010


On Sep 17, 2010, at 16:12, Emden R. Gansner wrote:

> I recently updated the macports on my macbook. I now find that latex, pdflatex and many tex packages have disappeared.
> port reports that the various texlive packages are installed. I thought these were the ones that supplied /opt/local/bin/pdflatex.
> I have tried reinstalling some of these to no effect. How can I get pdflatex back?

It appears that pdflatex is currently provided by the port "texlive-latex".

The texlive system in MacPorts was not too long ago split from a couple monolithic ports into (currently) over 80 smaller ports providing specific features. This does unfortunately mean that users upgrading from the former monolithic version lose some features, until they find and install the new ports providing those features. "port search texlive" will show you those ports. "texlive" is a metaport which can be used to install certain collections of these ports, if you don't want to wade through them individually. For example, installing "texlive +full" will install all texlive ports. This will take a long time.

In fact, pdflatex seems to just be a symlink to pdftex, which is installed by the texlive-bin port.


> More generally, is there some way to find out
> which macport package supplies some program in /opt/local/bin?

Unfortunately, not really. The "port provides" command exists, so I was able to answer your question by running "port provides /opt/local/bin/pdflatex", but only because I had already installed that port and that file did exist on my system.





More information about the macports-users mailing list