6

I have recently joined the mac club and I am having trouble using pdflatex. I have installed MacTex which should have everything included but when trying to run typeset I receive the error

'/usr/texbin/pdflatex does not exist. TeXShop is a front end for TeX, but you also need a TeX distribution. Perhaps such a distribution was not installed or was removed during a system upgrade. If so, go to http://www.tug.org/mactex/ and follow the instructions to (re)install MacTeX. A less likely possibility is that a tool path is incorrectly configured in TeXShop preferences. This can happen if you are using the macports or fink distributions.'

I have searched for pdflatex and could not find it anywhere...can anyone help me? I have read other forums which say reinstalling MacTex doesn't work and I also did this and it made no difference.

Extra info:

OS 10.10.1 Yosemite I have reasonable experience using linux / terminal

Improve this question
4
  • Welcome to TeX-sx! Did you try the 'fix MacTeX' utility from the MacTeX site?
    – Joseph Wright ♦
    Jan 28, 2015 at 15:51
  • For some reason texbin is a file, not a folder?? I guess that could be the problem?
    – UpperEastSide
    Jan 28, 2015 at 17:14
  • @MichaelHemming It should be a link. For example, ls -l /usr gives me lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 63 6 Jun 2014 texbin -> /Library/TeX/Distributions/.DefaultTeX/Contents/Programs/texbin
    – Joseph Wright ♦
    Jan 28, 2015 at 17:17
  • Welcome to TeX.SX! Usually, we don't put a greeting or a “thank you” in our posts. While this might seem strange at first, it is not a sign of lack of politeness, but rather part of our trying to keep everything very concise. Accepting and upvoting answers is the preferred way here to say “thank you” to users who helped you.
    – Martin Schröder
    May 9, 2015 at 19:45

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
7

I think I figured it out.

Go into your terminal and type in: which pdftex

You should get some sort of directory where your latex is installed. like: /opt/local/bin/pdftex

What you should do now is to change the directory where TexShop looks.

Do this by going into Preferences > Engine: and changing the path settings to the directory that which pdftex gave out.

I put /opt/local/bin/ and it worked out for me.

Looking around on the internet tells me that this is a macports problem. So you have to change it manually.

Improve this answer
4
  • Ah, macports. Everyone's favorite package manager to hate on :) It's generally advised to not deal with TeX stuff using package managers -- the interdependencies are too complicated for a large-scale manager to really do well. (Aside, homebrew > macports ;).)
    – Sean Allred
    Jul 8, 2015 at 20:31
  • This didn't work for me, I typed 'which pdftex' into terminal and got no output.
    – User27
    Feb 9, 2016 at 14:26
  • which pdflatex returns nothing!
    – Mona Jalal
    Sep 12, 2017 at 2:40
  • Then LaTeX is probably not installed correctly.
    – user2047437
    Nov 29, 2017 at 14:56

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .