Rd2dvi --pdf

On Mon, 4 Jan 2010, Matthew Fero wrote:

I know this has been addressed before, but I'm not sure I  
understand the prior comments.

Does the R Mac binary installer include the latex components  
necessary to run the 'R CMD Rd2dvi --pdf' command?  If so, where

No.  See the FAQ, specifically section 2.1 and

http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/RMacOSX-FAQ.html#TeX-suite-of-tools-for-documentation-_0028optional_0029

Note that these days the 'R Mac binary installer' contains much less  
than it used to, basically just R (not Tcl/Tk for example).

should it be located, because I'm getting the error, "/Library/ 
Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/bin/Rd2dvi: line 233: /usr/texbin/ 
pdflatex: No such file or directory".  If not, any suggestions on  
an easy way to install a lightweight, compatible latex distribution?

Unfortunately the CRAN binary of R (which I presume you are using)  
hardocodes the path to the TeX distribution (to values appropriate  
to MacTeX).

 Depending on the architecture you are using, look in the file named  
like /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/etc/i386/Renviron and  
either edit the file or set the appropriate environment variables  
appropriately.

MacTeX is not 'lightweight' but you do need quite a lot (including  
fonts) to process Rd format.  So unless you install a comprehensive  
distribution or have one that updates itself on the fly, you are  
likely to spend a lot of time chasing down additional TeX packages.

Thanks,

Matthew

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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