Re: Enhanced Carbon TeX-run-LateX

[Michael Slass <miknrene@drizzle.com>]

Tom Dye <tdye@lava.net> writes:

>Aloha emacs masters,
>
>I'm setting up the Enhanced Carbon emacs on several new iMacs, mostly to 
>run LaTeX.  When I run the TeX-run-Latex function, tcsh claims it can't 
>find latex.  I use the bash shell for all the user accounts, and a "which 
>latex" command finds the latex binary just fine.  From the bash prompt I 
>launched tcsh, and a "which latex" there found the latex binary, too, 
>which leads me to believe that tcsh can see the latex binary (unless it 
>was retrieving this info through bash?)
>
>How can I solve this problem?  Do I have to install a .cshrc file to 
>direct tcsh to the latex binary?  Or, is there an easy way to have emacs 
>send the latex command to the bash shell instead?
>

A few ideas:

- If you're starting emacs from some kind of desktop shortcut, then
  emacs is inheriting its environment from the desktop, and your
  .*rc files are not necessarily relevant here.  I don't know where
  OS-X gets the desktop environment, but your description of the
  disparity between emacs and bash indicates that their environments
  come from different places.

  If you want to sidestep the issue of where emacs's environment comes
  from, and just fix it, you can see where emacs will look for
  executables for sub-processes by examining the value of exec-path:

  ,----
| exec-path's value is 
|
| ("/usr/kerberos/bin" "/usr/local/bin" "/bin" "/usr/bin"
| "/usr/X11R6/bin" "/home/mikesl/bin" "/usr/java/bin"
| "/home/mikesl/bin" "/usr/java/bin"
| "/usr/libexec/emacs/21.3/i386-redhat-linux")
| 
| 
| Documentation:
| *List of directories to search programs to run in subprocesses.
| Each element is a string (directory name) or nil (try default directory).
| 
| You can customize this variable.
`----

If you don't see the directory where your latex executable resides in
that list, emacs won't find it.  You can add dirs to the list with
(add-to-list 'exec-path "/some/new/path")
or by using the customize interface, if you're more comfortable with that.


- If you're going to make a habit of using emacs to edit LaTeX files,
  I'd recommend using auctex.  It has lots of nifty features, is
  actively maintained, and is well supported.  Google knows where it
  is, and it has installation instructions that come with.  Read those
  before posting "how do I use auctex?" questions. ;)

-- 
Mike Slass