MacTex 2022 issues

mactex

I have two MacBookAirs, an older one where I installed MacTex-2018 and a newer one where I installed Mac Tex 2021. MacTex works superbly in both cases.

My older laptop died and I got a new MacAir and I have installed MacTex2022. The result is complete chaos. I have not experienced any of these problems with any of the previous incarnations of MacTex and I have been using this soft for more than 15 years.

There are too many issues to list them all, but here is a sample.

The 2022 version has problems processing files using the gsm-l package (created by the American Math Soc for authors). It cannot find this package apparently.I have no clue where to place this package. I did not have to do anything special when using version < 2022. If I change the option gsm-l to a world scientific .cls option Things work fine.

I use the packages pb-diagram, pb-lams, lamsarrow to generate diagrams. On some of my files they work. On most they do not. I have the lams fonts, placed them in the Library directory as usual but it does not help because, sometimes MacTex cannot find them. On other occasions I do not have thises issues.

The packages graphicx and epstopf also work erratically. That is, they work in some files, but on some other files they cannot seem to locate the .eps files. I have included in my texts jpg and png files. Same type of issue here. Works on some files fail on other.

I have not experienced any of the above issues using earlier versions of Mac Tex. I work in the cloud (Dropbox) so I have not changed the structure of the directories containing the tex files I am working on.

Admittedly, my computer skills are limited, but I have installed MacTex on about a dozen of Macs over the years and everything worked like I charm. I have followed closely the installation instructions and I now have in my laptop a "beast" whose behavior does not display any obvious pattern.

I currently have Monterrey 12.3.1, the same operating system on which MacTex 2021 on my other laptop works well.

I am out of ideas and I would appreciate any suggestions you might have. Thanks!

Update The mystery deepens. In my frustration I have installed MikTex for Mac I did the following experiment.

I ran a Tex file using TexShop/MacTex and I encountered various problems. The process ended with a Fatal Error message. Then I processed the same TeX file using miktex-texwork. Things worked well. I tried TexShop again on the file. It worked like a charm. No more problems.

Did the same think with other TeX files and I observed the same thing. TexShop works well only after I first process the Tex file using miktex.

Including log files here seems pointless. There are too many types of errors that vary from file to file to discern a pattern. I have my own TeX template so they all have the same preamble.

Final update It is about Dropbox. Starting with Monterrey upgrade Dropbox is not working properly. This affects the behavior of MacTex2022 as well if you try to work in the cloud. The earlier versions of MacTex do not seem to be affected by this.

Best Answer

Based on the comments, I've managed to reconstruct the basic problem here, which relates to changes in the MacOS as of Monterey (OS 12) and apps like Dropbox and OneDrive.

As of MacOS 12, there are changes in the way that cloud based files are stored. Dropbox and OneDrive (and presumably other cloud sync solutions) now default to "Files on Demand" mode, which means that files that are not actively being used will remain on the server, and only get downloaded when opened. Effectively this means that although the files appear in the Finder as a kind of stub, they have no actual content. This is a problem that Dropbox and OneDrive are aware of, but have not yet successfully fixed. It is hoped that they will and the solutions given below will no longer be necessary.

Problems with (older) local files

When you try to compile a file which requires one of the "cloud only" files, the file will not be flagged as missing, (since it does exist), but it will effectively load no content. [Thanks to Phelype Oleinik for discussion of of how packages are loaded].

This will lead to errors in the following circumstances (probably a non-exhaustive list):

existing .aux files that are supposed to be read during compilation
files that are inserted into your main document with \input or \include
local (to the source document folder) classes or packages

If any of these files are "cloud only" the code they contain will not exist, and any macros they define will then give rise to "Undefined control sequence errors". Such errors can be very misleading, since you would assume that the files are all there, especially on existing documents that used to compile without errors before.

Problems with a `texmf` folder on Dropbox

Further problems can arise if you have your local texmf folder linked to a Dropbox folder as described here:

Centralised .bib file on Mac

If you do have this setup, then many of your locally installed packages and classes will have a "cloud only" status, and so will give rise to errors if you try to load them.

Solutions

Depending on the situation, you can solve the problems in either a specific or general way.

Individual folder solution

For .aux files, simply deleting them before recompiling an old document should be sufficient.

For local \input or \included files or local to the source document folder packages or classes, simply opening these files first in your editor will download them and they will be usable again.

General solution

For a texmf folder linked to Dropbox, the solutions above are impractical. In this case a better long term solution is to make sure that the linked Dropbox folder is set to be "Make files available offline". This will stop the "cloud only" status from applying to that folder. Since the status applies recursively to all containing files and folders, you just need to set that status for the top level folder. To do this, right-click (or control-click) on the Finder icon for the folder, and there will be a set of Dropbox menu items. Choose the "Make available offline" item.

Of course this solution will work for any individual folders, and since .tex files usually aren't large, it's probably fine to use it for an folder containing .tex files. But in practice, I don't think it's necessary for most situations, since the individual folder solutions are adequate.

There's also a global Dropbox setting to turn off Files on Demand, but this seems like a non-optimal solution, since Files on Demand is generally a useful space saver.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] auto-pst-pdf and TeXstudio under MacTeX

To diagnose your problem, try this with pdflatex -shell-escape filename.tex.

% this input file name is filename.tex
% compile it with pdflatex -shell-escape filename.tex

\documentclass[preview,border=12pt]{standalone}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents*}{temporary.tex}
\documentclass[pstricks,border=12pt]{standalone}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\newsavebox\IBox
\savebox\IBox{\includegraphics{example-image-a.eps}}
\psset{xunit=\wd\IBox,yunit=\ht\IBox}
\begin{document}
\begin{pspicture}[showgrid=top](1,1)
    \rput[bl](0,0){\usebox\IBox}
\end{pspicture}
\end{document}
\end{filecontents*}

\usepackage{graphicx,pgffor}
\edef\AutoRotateOff{-dAutoRotatePages=/None}

\foreach \compiler/\ext in {latex/tex,dvips/dvi,ps2pdf \AutoRotateOff/ps}{\immediate\write18{\compiler\space temporary.\ext}}

\begin{document}
This is a test. The following figure should be processed OK when PdfLaTeX is run.

\bigskip

\includegraphics{temporary.pdf}% extension is not necessary
\end{document}

If you can get the following, there is a problem with your editor.

enter image description here

[Tex/LaTex] How to debug a failed MacTex installation

This is following the advice of Sean Allred

step 1, make sure it actually failed to install: open up a terminal and type the command tex --version.

step 2, check the last few lines of the install log by typing tail -n 500 /var/log/install.log | less which will display the last 500 entries in the log

step 3, look for any error messages, for example mine was

PackageKit: Install Failed: Error Domain=PKInstallErrorDomain Code=110 "An error occurred while extracting files from the package “MacTeX.pkg”." UserInfo=0x7fb765f67ec0 {NSUnderlyingError=0x7fb765f9ae80 "The operation couldn’t be completed. cpio read error: Undefined error: 0", NSURL=file://localhost/Users/username/Downloads/MacTeX.pkg#root.pkg, PKInstallPackageIdentifier=org.tug.mactex.texlive2015, NSLocalizedDescription=An error occurred while extracting files from the package “MacTeX.pkg”

step 4, Google the error message. In the case of the above message, many users who downloaded MacTex saw this message when there downloaded files were corrupted during the download process. These problems can occur when MacTex is downloaded through the official website and sometimes even when using specific servers on this page. Some of the users experiencing this error message had success when doing the download from a different server on the above page (rather than the one closest to their physical location - note servers farther away may take more time to download from). I had to switch countries twice, but it finally worked. In addition, some users report issues using firefox or chrome (sometimes switching to safari yields a successful download). If all of the above have failed, most users who used github or torrent to download the files, instead of the official site, seemed to do so successfully without any of the files being corrupted.

step 5, if you can't figure out the meaning of the error message and no piece of the error message (note please search for small pieces of the error message as things like your directory structure, user name, and other system specific information will vary from user to user and may lead to no search results when these pieces of information are included) seems to be triggering a search result describing a similar problem to yours, you then should ask the relevant online community (or contact the support team at MacTex) describing the problem. Be sure to include the error message so future users with the same problem will then be able to see your thread.