[texhax] installed MacTeX, unable to typeset anything

[Jacob Wegelin]

Recently, I joined TUG and the members at tug.org list. Someone on that list recommended I post my current questions to texhax at tug.org instead.  The Web, on the other hand (http://www.tug.org/mactex/2010/support/emailform/)  suggests I post to mactex-support at tug.org. Are these lists equivalent?

Do I need to sign up for texhax at tug.org and/or for mactex-support at tug.org? Or does one just post to them?

Please let me know if should post the following questions to a different forum.

I work on Mac OS 10.6.8. In addition to the graphical user interface, I constantly use the unix bash shell, via the so-called "Terminal" application.

Incidentally, although I'm new to MacTex, I am not new to LaTeX, just rusty.  I used LaTeX in the 1990s, which was installed on unix machines at the University of Washington (Seattle).  I wrote a dissertation in it although I never learned how to modify any of the settings (font, margins, etc.).

At that time, I edited my files in vi. Now I habitually use vim.

Yesterday I downloaded

MacTeX.mpkg.zip [ approximately 1.6G - 08 September 2010 ]

and today I unzipped and installed it, as shown here:

/Applications/TeX> ls -lat
total 1016
drwxr-xr-x   3 somtech  staff     102 Jul 18 14:10 TeX Live Utility.app/
drwxr-xr-x   3 somtech  staff     102 Jul 18 14:10 TeXShop.app/
drwxr-xr-x   3 somtech  staff     102 Jul 18 14:10 TeXworks.app/
drwxr-xr-x   3 somtech  staff     102 Jul 18 14:10 BibDesk.app/
drwxr-xr-x   3 somtech  staff     102 Jul 18 14:10 LaTeXiT.app/
drwxrwxr-x  13 root     admin     442 Jul 18 14:10 ./
drwxrwxr-x+ 90 root     admin    3060 Jul 18 14:10 ../
drwxr-xr-x   7 somtech  staff     238 Sep  7  2010 Excalibur-4.0.7/
drwxr-xr-x  14 somtech  staff     476 Sep  7  2010 LuaTeX-and-XeTeX/
-rw-r--r--   1 somtech  staff   42834 Jul 21  2010 Eps-and-PdfLaTeX.pdf
-rw-r--r--   1 somtech  staff   62039 May 28  2010 What Is Installed.pdf
-rw-r--r--   1 somtech  staff   71091 Apr 26  2010 TeX Live Manager.pdf
-rw-r--r--   1 somtech  staff  334681 Apr 26  2010 READ ME FIRST.pdf
/Applications/TeX>


(A) In spite of installing it, I do not find the software on the command line. The command

which pdflatex

returns nothing, as do the following variants:

which pdfLaTeX

which pdfLatex

Similarly, the following turn up nothing:

which pdfTeX

which pdftex

(B) What's up with TexShop? I copied "my first LaTeX document" from http://www.cs.wright.edu/~jslater/mac-tex/mac-tex-intro/mactexintro.html into TexShop and hit the "typeset" button, and got an "environment lslisting undefined" error.

Per the READ ME FIRST file, I have checked and confirmed under Preferences, Engine tab, Path Settings that the first path setting is /usr/texbin .

It said "type H <return> for immediate help" but when I did so, it said "your command was ignored."

(C) I also tried using LaTexit. First, per the READ ME FIRST pdf, I checked that the paths were correct in the Composition module.  (There was no need to change them). Then I copied "my first document" from the url listed below into the editor. Many of the latex tags were in blue, suggesting that LaTeXit recognized them as latex tags/code, but the last couple were not, suggesting something had gone wrong.

I did File, Latex it, and got a slew of errors as follows:

line 12 paragraph ended before \align was complete

line 12 missing $ inserted

etc.

Thanks for any pointers

Jake Wegelin