A previous post the best LaTeX system was a commercial for Gerben Wierda’s i-Installer to get a working tetex distribution. I’ve been working happily with this TeX-system for two years now but recently run into a few (minor) problems. In the process of solving these problems I created myself a second tetex-system more or less by accident. This is what happened. On the computer at the university I once got fun packages running such as a chess-, go- and Feynman diagrams-package but somehow I cannot reproduce this on my home-machine, I get lots of errors with missing fonts etc. As I really wanted to TeX some chess-diagrams I went surfing for the most recent version of the chess-package and found one for Linux and one under the Fink-project : the chess-tex package. So, I did a 

sudo fink
install chess-tex
forgetting that in good Fink-tradition you can only install a package by installing at the same time all packages needed to run it, so I was given a whole list of packages that Fink wanted to install including a full tetex-system. Did I want to continue? Well, I had to think on that for a moment but realized that the iTex-tree was living under /usr/local whereas Fink creates trees under /sw so there should not really be a problem, so yes let’s see what happens. It took quite a while (well over an hour and a half) but when it was done I had a second full TeX-system, but how could I get it running? Of course I could try to check it via the command line but then I remembered that there is an alternative front-end for TeXShop namely iTeXMac which advertises that it can run either iTeX or the Fink-distribution of tetex. So I downloaded it, looked in the preferences which indeed contains a pane

where you can choose between using the standard tetex-distribution or the Fink-distribution and iTeXMc finds automatically the relevant folders. So I wrote a quick chess diagram ran it trough iTeXMac and indeed it produced the graphics I expected! This little system gave me some confidence in the Fink-distribution so I fired up the Fink-Commander and looked under categories : text for other TeX packages I could install and there were plenty : Latex2HTML, Latex2rtf, Feynman, tex4ht and so on. Installing them with the commander is fun : just click on the package you want and click ‘Install’ under the Source-dropdown window

and in the lower part of the window you can follow the installation process, whereas the upper part tells you what packages are already installed and what their version-number is. I still have to figure out how I will add new style files to this fink-tree and I have to get used to the iTeXMac-editor but so far I like the robustness of the system and the easy install procedure, so try it out!

LaTeX, mac