Re: Setting up Emacs, AucTeX and (La)TeX on Mac OSX

[Norman Gray]

Greetings,

"D. D. Brierton" <darren@dzr-web.com> writes:

>First questions: is it best (or necessary) to install the X server Apple
>recently released, or are there native Aqua builds of Emacs and whatever DVI
>viewers she might need (I guess that if she just uses pdflatex then she can
>just use Aqua's native PDF rendering for previewing?)?

I wouldn't bother installing Apple's X server at this stage -- you
really don't need it.

I use Gerben Wierda's teTeX distribution, which is an OS X distribution
of the standard TeX distribution.  I use it in a unixy way, but very
many folk swear by Richard Koch's TeXShop, which is a nice front end
for it.  Both, and much more, are pointed to by
<http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/>.  That site also points to the
MacOSX-TeX mailing list, which is reasonable-volume, and useful.

On the Mac I use pdf(la)tex exclusively.  OS X's Preview application
works OK, really, but has occasionally wimped out on me, so I use
Acrobat Reader to view PDFs.

I use porkrind emacs, at <http://www.porkrind.org/emacs/>, which is a
build of Andrew Choi's current snapshot of Emacs 21.3
<http://mac-emacs.sourceforge.net>.  Yes, you could lift the source and
build it yourself, but I've built emacs enough times that the novelty
has worn off, and I really can't see the need to bother.

Folk seem to both swear by and swear at Fink.  I've managed perfectly
well so far, without having to form an opinion, so if I were you I'd
avoid it at present, and so avoid multiplying your worries
unnecessarily.

>Next question: are there nice prebuilt binary packages which we can download
>and install, or do we need to build from source, and if so, does the
>bog-standard OSX install contain all the necessary developer tools?

If you do need to build stuff, then you'll need to install the
developer tools.  They're not installed by default, but can be found on
the grey CD which came with the OS X CDs.

Good luck,

Norman

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Norman Gray                        http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/