[Tex/LaTex] “makeindex” in Mac OS X (Snow Leopard)

Question

I use LaTeX on a Mac, using TeXShop. It is possible to compile an index from within the TeXShop interface, except when I have more than one index (say, people and concepts) for the same text. In this case I used to compile it from Terminal:

makeindex MyIndex

say. But since I went from Mac OS 10.5 to 10.6 (Snow Leopard), the latter does not work anymore (albeit normal, single-index compilation from within TeXShop works fine). Any idea?

Answer 1

The following answer is compiled from the comments, so that we can remove this question from the "unanswered" list.

The problem you are describing is characteristic of a path problem with your shell profile. To determine whether you are able to run the makeindex command from the command line, you can do:

which makeindex

This should return: /usr/texbin/makeindex. If it doesn't, and returns nothing, then your TeX binaries aren't being found. (They are found by TeXShop because it sets its own path for all commands.)

To see what your path is, you can enter:

echo $PATH

This should return something that includes /usr/texbin; if it doesn't you need to fix that in your .profile or .bashrc file.

If you're using MacTeX 2008, you have a really old distribution. I would strongly encourage you to update to MacTeX 2011.

As egreg notes, for multiple indices the package imakeidx is useful, as it automates the run of makeindex. (He is the author of imakeidx.)