In this post I’ll describe how to get LaTeX up and running on a Mac. First of all, it’s not as easy as just going, brew install latex
, and then saying, pdflatex kapow.tex
, but it’s not as hard as doing literally anything on Windows either.
Install MacTex
There’s a special LaTeX for Macs called, wait for it, MacTex. You go to their internet website, and then download and install their package. No sweat. Once that is done, navigate to /Applications/Tex
and install the package found therein, FixMacTex2014.pkg
.
At this point you might be thinking, “Good, I’m all set. I can use pdflatex
now.” Well, not so fast cowboy.
pdflatex
Compiling LaTeX documents from the command line requires one more operation. You have to add /usr/texbin
to the $PATH
variable. You can do this from the command line with the following line,
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/texbin
Now, you should be able to compile .tex
files into .pdf
files using the pdflatex
utility as
pdflatex foobar.tex && open foobar.pdf
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