General Information about LaTex for the Mac

NOTE: THE INFORMATION BELOW IS NOW QUITE OUT OF DATE. IT APPLIES TO MAC OS 8 AND WITH SOME MINOR MODIFICATIONS TO MAC OS 9. OS X is quite different, and works very well with LaTeX. See the PSU MacOS X TeX/LaTeX site for an excellent compilation of information. Gerben Wierda's distribution of TeX (available here) has many useful features, is easy to install, and of interest to linguists, even comes with the tipa IPA fonts.


The Penn State Macintosh TeX/LaTeX Web Site has lots of information about LaTex for the Mac.

The "Mac Versions of TeX & LaTeX" link available from that page has information about (and links to) several different versions of LaTex for the Mac.

Information about OzTex (somewhat Linguistics specific)

The version of LaTeX for the Mac that I use is OzTeX, so the information in this section about installing and using LaTeX on a Mac is specific to OzTeX.

OzTeX comes with a text editor called AlphaLite. This is very much like Emacs and can be used with Emacs commands.

However, if you want to use Emacs for the Mac as your text editor, it can be obtained at:
ftp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/parmet/

But, note that this version of Emacs doesn't work on late-model Macs, I believe with system 8.1 and higher (maybe not with system 8.0 either).

NOTE: There is a newer version (called XEmacs) of Emacs for the Mac that works on more recent Macs. I have not tried it though, and don't know details, but you can find out about it here

In order to use BibTex (which comes with OzTeX), put any .sty files (e.g. linquiry.sty) in the "LaTeX" folder which is in the "TeX-inputs" folder. When using Fetch to download .sty files, Fetch should be set to "binary", not "automatic" or "text". The .bst and .bib files go in the "BibTeX inputs" folder which is in the BibTeX folder in OzTeX. Unlike .sty files, you can use the "automatic" setting instead of "binary" on Fetch.

In order to use macros like cgloss and gb4e with OzteX, put the .sty files in the "Latex" folder which is inside the "TeX-inputs" folder. If you download the .sty files, again, make sure Fetch is set on "binary".

To use psfig.sty, put it in the DVIPS folder which is in the TeX-inputs folder. Again, this, like all .sty files should be downloaded with Fetch set on "binary".

Other Tools

A PostScript viewer for the Mac is available at:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/mac/index.html

Note that this viewer is somewhat more limited than the Ghostview available on Unix machines.


You can set up your Mac to act as an X terminal by downloading the MicroImages X Server for Macs, but note that this leads to very slow operation.