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LaTeX Broken On MacPort “texlive” Update

I spent about 4 hours today troubleshooting a stupid, stupid issue with the “texlive +full” package as provided by MacPorts, which is required to run certain GUI LaTeX editors such as TeXShop. Several days ago I ran an innocuous-looking…

preston$ sudo port sync
preston$ sudo port upgrade outdated

…and amongst many things that updated, texlive was one of them. Unfortunately, running tools such as the command-line “latex” command or GUIs such as TeXShop started giving me the following error:

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.11 (TeX Live 2010/MacPorts 2010_0)
restricted \write18 enabled.
—! /opt/local/var/db/texmf/web2c/pdftex/pdflatex.fmt doesn’t match pdftex.pool
(Fatal format file error; I’m stymied)

After much fruitless searching and hair pulling, I stumbled upon this ticket that notes the solution as:

preston$ sudo fmtutil-sys –all

After running this, LaTeX seems to work properly again. Sheesh.

(Note to product developers: I would personally pay at least $50 for a simple, clean, stand-alone OS X app that does LaTeX really well. TeXShop and TextMate both do a good job, but I’d really like a 5-star “just works” editor that doesn’t install a bunch of system-level stuff like MacTeX. Just sayin’. 🙂 )