Can't find “kpsewhich” on PATH. Textmate+mactex [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
"kpsewhich" error when trying to build from Textmate

Most manuals I have seen on textmate claims that command+B is compiling LaTeX documents, however this command seems to just add \textbf{}. Some other manual claims that command+R is the way to compile, however this command yield the following result:

Can't find “kpsewhich” on PATH.

What does this mean, and what is the solution?

I have downloaded textmate and mactex. I'm not sure if I need the mactex.zip. I'm new to both text mate and Mac. (Have used LaTeX on Ubuntu for 2 years, however)

Answer 1

Your PATH environmental variable is a list of directories that your computer searches through in order to find programs to execute. You can find it by opening a terminal and typing:

echo $PATH

Most likely when you installed MacTeX, it did not change your PATH, and so your computer does not know what folders to look in in order to find your MacTeX executable programs ("binaries"). (kpsewhich is one such program).

There are different ways to change your PATH; googling it would turn up a lot. My personal preference would be to edit (or create) the file ~/.profile (or use ~/.bash_profile if it already exists), and add a line that looks like this:

export PATH=/usr/texbin:$PATH

That (after a new log in) should add /usr/texbin to the beginning of your PATH. Note, I am not a MacTeX user, and so I'm not sure that's the right directory to add. I'm getting that from this page in the MacTeX FAQ. You'll want to make sure that directory contains kpsewhich and the other MacTeX programs. (For me, on texlive for Linux, they're in /usr/local/texlive/2011/bin/x86_64-linux.)