checking for pdflatex

Dear Simon,

Thanks for this, and to the others who responded to my question. The FAQ
and Matt Denwood's response jogged my memory, and reminded me that I
encountered this problem before.

In this case, I don't see a good solution, but I'll think about the
problem some more.

Without providing too many tedious details, the development version of the
Rcmdr package checks at startup what resources are available to it,
including pdflatex, and configures itself accordingly. Having inexperienced
users edit, e.g., their .Renviron files is probably a non-starter. The
Rcmdr could offer to do this at the user's option (it already provides
dialogs that guide the user to locations of missing software like LaTeX and
pandoc), but I'd still have to be able to figure out whether pdflatex is
available and if so where it's located.

Ian Gow suggested using locate, but I apparently can't rely on a locate
database having been compiled -- it wasn't on my Mac -- and the overhead of
compiling the locate db is excessive for a start-up check.

Again, thanks for explaining the problem.

John

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Urbanek [mailto:simon.urbanek at r-project.org]
Sent: March-16-15 10:39 AM
To: John Fox
Cc: Ian Gow; r-sig-mac at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R-SIG-Mac] checking for pdflatex

John,

see R for Mac FAQ 10.13: I get ?command not found? in the GUI yet it

works

in the Terminal ? why?

Cheers,
Simon

On Mar 15, 2015, at 6:21 PM, John Fox <jfox at mcmaster.ca> wrote:

Dear Ian,

Thanks for this. Please see below:

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Gow [mailto:iandgow at gmail.com]
Sent: March-15-15 5:07 PM
To: John Fox
Cc: r-sig-mac at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R-SIG-Mac] checking for pdflatex

I think it's driven by the PATH variable, which appears to differ for
me between RStudio and R from Terminal on the one hand and R.app on
the other.

Yes, I understand that, though I don't understand why there's a
difference in the path.

Sys.getenv("PATH")

[1] "/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin"

Sys.which("pdflatex")

pdflatex
      ""

If I add

Sys.setenv(PATH=paste(Sys.getenv("PATH"),"/opt/local/bin", sep=":"))

to ~/.Rprofile then R.app finds pdflatex (from MacPorts in my case).

Sys.which("pdflatex")

                 pdflatex
"/opt/local/bin/pdflatex"

Sys.getenv("PATH")

[1] "/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/local/bin"

The problem for me is to determine whether pdflatex is installed
*without* knowing in advance where it's installed. I haven't described
the purpose of this, and, in the interest of brevity, won't for the
time-being, but it may also prove necessary to determine where pdflatex

resides.

Best,
John

On 15 Mar 2015, at 16:46, John Fox wrote:

Dear list members,

I need to determine whether pdflatex is installed and have been
doing that via Sys.which("pdflatex"). This works when R is run in a
terminal window (or in RStudio):

Sys.which("pdflatex")

          pdflatex
"/usr/texbin/pdflatex"

but not from R.app:

Sys.which("pdflatex")

pdflatex
  ""

The session info is the same in both cases:

-------------- snip ----------------

sessionInfo()

R version 3.1.3 (2015-03-09)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit) Running under: OS X
10.10.2 (Yosemite)

locale:
[1] en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8/C/en_CA.UTF-

8/en_CA.UTF-

8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

-------------- snip ----------------

Why is the result different? Is there a better way to check for the
presence of pdflatex?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
John

------------------------------------------------
John Fox, Professor
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/

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