[R] Running LaTeX dvi previewer on MacOS X

[Frank E Harrell Jr]

Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
> On Feb 29, 2008, at 5:39 PM, Michael wrote:
> 
>> On 29 Feb 2008, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
>>
>>> On Feb 29, 2008, at 12:38 PM, Michael wrote:
>>>> On 29 Feb 2008, Frank E. Harrell, Jr. wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Several people have given great advice on how to successfully use
>>>>> X11 on
>>>>> Mac to so we can use the dvi previewer to view latex() output from
>>>>> Hmisc.  Now after a version upgrade of X11 and X11sdk we are  
>>>>> getting
>>>>> lots of crashes.  I noticed a Mac dvi previewer with an executable
>>>>> stored as /Applications/TeX/TeXShop.app/Contents/MacOS/TeXShop
>>>>>
>>>>> Can we bypass X11 problems and point Hmisc to this executable  
>>>>> for dvi
>>>>> viewing?
>>>> I think TeXshop converts dvi to pdf (something like dvips ->  
>>>> ps2pdf) for
>>>> viewing. Why not just use pdf for Mac?  Preview.app on Leopard  
>>>> does do
>>>> live updating.
>>> And Skim.app does updating on Tiger, and is IMHO much better to
>>> Preview.app in other ways (works with pdfsync for instance, allows
>>> syncing back and forth between the pdf file and the corresponding tex
>>> source)
>> We were not talking about using TeXshop to edit LaTeX files.   
>> Rather the
>> latex() function Hmisc generates a dvi file and the question is how  
>> to view
>> it since Mac does not have native dvi viewer (other than xdvi).   
>> The pdfsync
>> function of Skim or TeXshop is irrelevant.
> 
> Why is it important that the output file be a dvi file? Would it be a  
> problem to have the latex() function produce a pdf file on mac systems?
> I thought the latex() command was just producing tex code.

This discussion is about previewing the result of latex(), and Hmisc has 
several dvi-related functions.  One could write a similar pdf conversion 
or pdf viewer functions taking as input the result of dvi(latex()). 
Also, I'm trying to just make the mechanisms in Hmisc for latex() that 
work fine on Linux/Unix/Windows work well for Mac users.

Frank


> 
>> Michael
> 
> Haris Skiadas
> Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
> Hanover College
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> 


-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University