“makeindex” in Mac OS X (Snow Leopard)

Question

I use LaTeX on a Mac, using TeXShop. It is possible to compile an index from within the TeXShop interface, except when I have more than one index (say, people and concepts) for the same text. In this case I used to compile it from Terminal:

makeindex MyIndex

say. But since I went from Mac OS 10.5 to 10.6 (Snow Leopard), the latter does not work anymore (albeit normal, single-index compilation from within TeXShop works fine). Any idea?

Answer 1

The following answer is compiled from the comments, so that we can remove this question from the "unanswered" list.

The problem you are describing is characteristic of a path problem with your shell profile. To determine whether you are able to run the makeindex command from the command line, you can do:

which makeindex

This should return: /usr/texbin/makeindex. If it doesn't, and returns nothing, then your TeX binaries aren't being found. (They are found by TeXShop because it sets its own path for all commands.)

To see what your path is, you can enter:

echo $PATH

This should return something that includes /usr/texbin; if it doesn't you need to fix that in your .profile or .bashrc file.

If you're using MacTeX 2008, you have a really old distribution. I would strongly encourage you to update to MacTeX 2011.

As egreg notes, for multiple indices the package imakeidx is useful, as it automates the run of makeindex. (He is the author of imakeidx.)

Answer 2

Add the line

% !TEX TS-program = latexmk

at the top of your .tex file and compile it using the LaTeX engine. (In TeXShop Typeset

with LaTeX selected.)

The following is an example and the 3-page output.

% !TEX TS-program = latexmk
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{multind}
\makeindex{indexA}
\makeindex{indexB}


\begin{document}

I use LaTeX on a \index{indexA}{Mac}Mac, using \index{indexB}{TeXShop}TeXShop. It is possible 
to compile an \index{indexA}{index}index from within the \index{indexB}{TeXShop}TeXShop 
interface, except when I have more than one \index{indexA}{index}index (say, people and 
concepts) for the same text. In this case I used to compile it from Terminal:

makeindex MyIndex

say. But since I went from Mac OS 10.5 to 10.6 (Snow Leopard), the latter does not work 
anymore (albeit normal, single-index compilation from within \index{indexB}{TeXShop}TeXShop 
works fine). Any idea?

\printindex{indexA}{Index A}
\printindex{indexB}{Index B}
\end{document}

page 1 of the output:

page2 of the output:

page3 of the output: