thatkeith wrote:Huh. Well, to be clear I never doubted Thierry for a second; it was me that was in the dock.
Thanks Keith, I learned a new English expression
As I said already, I know nothing about pdflatex but I have a strong experience about connecting tools
and all Unix utilities. I even teached computer science at the University of Strasbourg in France for few years
using Unix boxes and I have around 30 years of experience on developing/managing software projects...
My aim was (and still is, in hope) to be able to package up the required tools and, ideally, store them within the app package.
This works well with exiftool and it appears that pdftk and pdfjam would also behave well...
but maybe pdflatex can't be persuaded to play this particular game.
I just installed BasicTeX on this clean test machine and my calls to pdfjam within my LC stack work fine, just as they did on my regular Mac with TeX and a few other additions in place. BasicTeX is a 75MB download, which is a *much* easier thing to persuade people to get.
Ok, I did download BasicTeX and scan the package internals; there is a very well written installation script
which explains what the installation is doing. From this quick reading I believe the installation of BasicTeX will be standard
on all machines.
If I had to do the job, I will kept the BasicTeX package to do the installation (need to check license compatibilities!) and code an initialization script in LiveCode which will set up few globals ( I use global in the generic way; could be a property or a script local variable or even some fields in a database,..) to have the needed directories at hand.
After that, a classic shell() call should do the trick, following my former posts.
Even if I never achieve my goal ...
I don't see why you shouldn't !
Otherwise, Hermann's stack could be another nice alternative and maybe less work?
Bonne chance
Thierry