Vlad Skvortsov's Blog

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My name is Vlad Skvortsov, I'm a software engineer: it's my job, hobby and addiction.

My primary interests include high-performance, scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems; server-side applications; information retrieval technologies; procedural aspects of software engineering process.

I work on several private and open-source projects, hacking in Python, Haskell, Erlang, Perl and C.

Guitar, hiking, ice hockey and other hobbies help me to balance my life.

My e-mail is vss@73rus.com.

Installing (Russian) LaTeX On MacOS X

Feb 03 2008, 11:15 permalink
Tags: cyrillic mac phd russian tex

Today I had to install LaTeX (with Russian support) on another Mac. Since it took me some time (and trial and error), I'm jotting down the recipe.

Fortunately, in the end of the day it's very simple. First, I downloaded and installed the gwTeX package from MacTeX section of the TeX User Group site. The package contents get installed under /usr/local/gwTeX, so I added /usr/local/gwTeX/bin/i386-apple-darwin-current to my $PATH.

I was able to produce a DVI file from my sources after that, but I needed a PDF. None of dvipdfm, dvipdfmx or dvipdft worked, failing to include the EPS graphics with messages like this:
...
[49(./figures/chapter4/general/function_R.eps<PS>
Config file contains no template to perform PS -> PDF conversion
)
pdf: image inclusion failed for (figures/chapter4/general/function_R.eps).
...

So I went ahead and installed Ghostscript (downloading the source tarball, and then following the usual way of "./configure && make && sudo make install"). The dvipdf is a part of this distribution, so that solved my DVI-to-PDF conversion problem.

This is it. I was surprised how easy that was, comparing to my previous attempt more than a year ago.