MacTex updates for El Capitan

El Capitan! Great! The new version of the OS X operating system. New features, new fonts, new problems… I knew that updating was going to bring some unexpected problems with my applications, but I wanted to update… And ditto, as soon as I tried to take a look under the hood for a couple of things I realised that a fresh installation of homebrewwas going to be needed.

More importantly, with my new book on data science (aka “Data Science and Analytics with Python”), LaTeX is probably one of the most used things in my computer. So, I wanted to check that things were fine and although I could compile (currently trying to finish Chapter 3 in case you are wondering) but there were some issues here and there, for example TeX Live thought I was using version 0 (yes zero!) and it could not find some files.

It turns out that El Capitan does not let us write to /usr and the 2015 TeX distribution creates symbolic links to /usr/texbin, is removed (if it was there from a previous OS version) and cannot be installed. If a GUI looks by default at that location it will sadly no longer find it. That is why the terminal was not affected! (Phew!)

The solution is to tell the broken applications to look at /Library/TeX/texbin, in /Library/TeX which is “owned” by MacTEX so is allowed by El Capitan. So to fix Tex Live do the following:

•  Open TEX Live Utility  Preferences and click on the Choose. . .
•  That opens a file chooser. Type Shift-Cmd-G , enter /Library/TeX  into the dialog box and then press Return .
• Finally Double-Click  on texbin
• Et voilà

For more info see this link.