[scribus] Mac Render Frame Problem

[Gregory Pittman]

On 06/20/2013 08:49 PM, Alvin Revzin wrote:
> Unlike previous versions, Scribus 1.4.2 works well on my Mac Mini with OSX-10.8.4 but if and only if Ghostscript and Scribus are in the Applications folder.
> There is one major problem, though. If I try to insert a render frame into a document, I get an error message that says "The application "pdflatex --nonstopmode" failed to start. Please check the path:" and then nothing further.
>
> This message makes no sense as there is no way to check the - unspecified - path.
> Also, IIRC, many years ago there was a "pdflatex" in the usual MacTeX distribution but it is nothing like it is in my current (2012) distribution (also in the Applications folder).
>
> Is this soluble or is it JAMI (Just Another Mac Incompatibility?
>
>
It's probably soluble, which doesn't necessarily mean it's quick and easy.
I just happened to have a tex/latex/pdflatex-free computer that I could 
put to the test. After about an hour or so I finally got it working.
This is on Fedora 18, so you'll have to translate for MacTex by googling.
latex/pdflatex is driven in Fedora by texlive, which is more individual 
packages than anyone probably needs. Let's say at the outset that the 
messages you get from the render frame are not very helpful but may give 
some fodder for Google.

I started out by running 'yum install texlive-pdflatex*, which got me a 
number of parts of the texlive distribution, but not enough. I can 
recall in the past that one of the stumbling blocks in this was 
texlive-extsizes, but this wasn't enough either. There was advice I 
could find about running 'texlive-config rehash' but this never helped.

Finally, I realized that Fedora has a package simply called 'texlive', 
which by running 'yum install texlive' gave me quite a long list of 
dependencies, which included texlive-cm and texlive-cm-super, one or the 
other of which seems to be key in running the render frame script, since 
it uses CM fonts.

I could have run 'yum install texlive*' I suppose, but I was trying to 
understand why the render frame was failing with something less than a 
battleship.

So in the end you should be able to solve this, but it's dependent on 
learning about how to install the parts of MacTex you need. I would add 
that I never had this problem before Fedora 18, so I think it's due to a 
major restructuring of Tex. The push seems to be toward using luatex and 
pdfluatex, but so far I can't get the gist of luatex. The main thing I 
know about luatex is that all my latex files won't convert using it.

Greg