Getting LaTeX on OS X

Well, you need LaTeX or some package to process your LaTeX files.
Since I’m running OSX I installed fink¹.

Then as root or using sudo, I installed tetex (complete typesetting system). Open a terminal and type:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tetex

Once, you have this, I think you can go from there. Use any old text editor and the command line to process your files. Suppose you have a file, first.tex, open up the terminal and type:
latex first.tex

This gives you a .dvi file. You can now create either a postscript file or pdf files as I have been doing:
dvipdfm first.dvi
I’m really not sure what the difference is between dvidpdf and dvipdfm. Maybe someone can tell me.

And voilà there is your first late file from tex.

Okay…you actually have to type proper commands in there but we’ll get to that.

Even though using any old text editor is fine, it would be advisable to get a nice editor just for LaTeX files. And we’ll get into that. Eventually I’ll get into windows too.

Getting LaTeX on OS X (Original Uncompleted Post) hehehe

Well, on linux it was easy, at least for most distributions it already seemed to be there.

Right now, I’m running Mac OS X (Panther!) and the best thing I heard was i-installer which sounded like a good idea but it took waaaay too long to download and…(I may or may not have been on dial-up then, but my faster internet connection is not much better so…). Thus I resorted to downloading and installingFink and then at Terminal.app:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tetex

and ta! da! i had TeX.

As time went by, I installed other packages I found out about…
Well, then I needed an editor and I guess one could use TextEdit…or the command line emacs but…why when there’s AquaEmacs or EnhancedCarbonEmacs (which I prefer of the two actually)

But better than even emacs (!!!), there’s TeXShop which is a nice little editor that’ll produce the PDF files for you right away (after all, what am I going to do with postscript?)

My Latex Blog

Well, it’s not much really and it’s not intended to teach anybody because I’m quite latex-ignorant but I’m teaching myself and I figure I can store things related to my quest for latex knowledge here.

Like that obscure search for some mathematical symbol…and so I don’t have to search for it multiple times.

Like my search for placing code in my files in a better way than verbatim.

And maybe when I finally truly understand headers I can explain here to me.

Hmm..not sure where post 2 is…