(a) — OK, then there must have been a corruption of the download, try downloading again and see how it goes, the current file should be 885,629 bytes in size. I really wish we could just double-click this file to install it…
(b) — if you run that you will in fact see a GUI requestor come up telling you what it will do.
(c) — CTRL+C is the usual way to send a signal to stop something in terminal. For man you type q to quit it. So try q first, then CTRL+C.
You are doing great, I wish my Dad (83) was a 1/10th as computer literate as you are
@bernardo_vasconcelos: thanks, I’ll bear that in mind when I’m back at that computer.
@scarlock: again thanks for your help; I’ll look into those when I’m back at the Mini. I’ve just tried ls -a on this MBA… it doesn’t have a .zprofile, but that doesn’t really surprise me.
@nontroppo: Thanks (a) It came to me that maybe Brave, my go-to browser, might be causing the problem, as there are a number of official sites where it fails and I have to use Safari. So, on this MBA, I tried through Safari, downloading it as Scriv-etc.scrivtemplate, and it installed without problem.
(b) I’ll try it if/when I try to install it all on this machine.
(c) Thanks for that. Again, I’ll try later when I’m wanting to explore further.
As for your Dad, I sympathise with him and you. I help, very often over the phone, an 83 year-old Mac using friend who is very impatient with technology. To make it more difficult, he is what I call “interface blind”… getting him to see the icon or button he needs to click requires a lot of patient explanation; it’s as if he is looking at a completely different system. We were round at his house yesterday and he asked me to look at his iMac, which “had stopped working”. I checked it was all connected to power and pressed the power button. A moment later he said, “Oh, it is working! What did you do?” “I pressed the power button.” “Power button? Where is the power button?” This is his second iMac, which he’s had for about 5 years!
@scarlock: I’m sorry, missed this in my last post. I’ve gone back to starting with @nontroppo’s template, as it is much more ‘readable’ to me, while @bernardo_vasconcelos’ template seemed like plunging too early into the deep end. I’ll come back to trying to understand that later. In the meantime, @nontroppo’s template, with it’s single YAML header, seems to me much clearer as to what paths I need to set and where I need to set them.
/usr/local/bin:/System/Cryptexes/App/usr/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Library/Apple/usr/bin://Applications/Topaz Photo AI.app/Contents/Resources/bin:/Applications/quarto/bin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/local/bin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/bin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/appleinternal/bin
cd
As you can see, no mention of Homebrew, which is installed in ./opt/homebrew/; quarto, markdown, multimarkdown and espanso are installed in /usr/local/bin/; Topaz Photo AI.app is actually in the normal Applications folder.
In due course, I might try re-installing Homebrew from the command line in Terminal, to see if that changes anything.
OK. I took the bit between my teeth and ran the command line installer and all went smoothly.
I the used the brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts command and it ran without problem, so then brew install font-alegreya font-alegreya-sans, with no problem.
So I’ve removed the .ttf duplicates of the .otf versions from the Fonts folder and archived them for good measure.
Clearly, there is a problem with the .PKG version of Homebrew, which makes it far less friendly for the newcomer than using the Terminal command (which did the whole process in about 1 minute on this M2Pro Mac Mini.
So, I’m set up to explore using @nontroppo’s template.
Thank you all for your great help. I will no doubt be back with questions as and when…
Yup, that explains the problems. $PATH variable is the key for the terminal to find things to run. You have just completed level 1 of Shell Proficiency Now to infinity and beyond!
Hello, I’m back having had a good break in beautiful Cornwall and other distractions. I have begun to explore how it all works with a small amount of data of my own, so, as predicted, I have a few questions/issues:
When I ran compile to PDF, not surprisingly, no PDF resulted. The Quarto.log ends with:
[INFO] Running filter citeproc
pandoc: /Users/mark/.local/share/pandoc/csl/apa.csl: withBinaryFile: does not exist (No such file or directory)
There was some problem opening /Users/mark/Desktop/quarto-food2.pdf, check compiler log…
Now, I know I haven’t adjusted the YAML bibliography paths from @nontroppo’s template, but more basically, it refers to citeproc. I have a very modest Bookends collection, and I know Bookends can create a parallel BibTex list (hitherto I’ve been working in RTF and Scanning with Bookends) but does that have to be converted to citeproc and if so, how?
but there is no .local folder on this machine (M2Pro) and I cannot locate the Pandoc installation, though it must be there somewhere. So I don’t know where the psth would need to be adjusted to.
I have installed HomeBrew on my MBA, together with the Alegreya fonts, but I need to install (multi)markdown, pandoc and quarto on it. Do I just type
You could make this folder (terminal command or use Finder as you prefer):
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/pandoc/
BUT this isn’t necessary[1], you can store files wherever is easiest for you. Now for csl: line you can just remove that line completely as Pandoc has a default CSL file anyway. Or if you want to use a style (thousands to choose from), download any you like (this is the apa one for example: Style Info)
For the bibliography file itself you are indeed correct, Bookends has a great feature that it will sync its database to a BibTeX file. Lets say you want to sync it to ~/Documents/References/Refs.bib you set that up in Bookends and sync. Now you can replace the path in the metadata:
So now Quarto will use the Refs.bib file[2]. You need some citations in your text that are in your bib file and you should see a bibliography in a PDF
Basically yes, although MMD is multimarkdown, so:
brew install pandoc quarto multimarkdown
You can keep all your tools up-to-date by running these commands every so often:
brew update; brew upgrade
The tab key should help autocomplete commands and arrow keys navigate history to make the terminal a bit faster to navigate over time…
[1] I have a lot of templates and tweaks to pandoc in my pandoc data folder, but this is set up by myself (I use github to clone my files into this folder so I can keep track of them), this isn’t necessary for starting users…
[2] Notice my references, Core.json is not a bib file. Pandoc allows several bibliography formats and json is the fastest. This is not an issue for you – stick to bib (unless you have a massive database like i do and want optimal compile times). As I’m a nerd I use a launchd script to automatically make a json file every time Bookends appends to the bib file and another launchd script to run the “Sync Linked BibTeX File…” command in Bookends every 12 hours. This is the sort of cool thing the *nix foundations and automation in macOS enable…
Thanks for those, Ian… all set up on the MBA. I’m creating a record of all these commands for HomeBrew so that I can find them easily if needed. I’ve been reading the documentation on the HomeBrew repository, but most of it seems to be aimed at those wanting to set up apps etc. for others to use, with little to help the new user who simply wants to use it to install apps, fonts etc.
I’ll experiment with the Tab key and the arrow keys.
As I’m a nerd I use a launchd script to automatically make a json file every time Bookends appends to the bib file and another launchd script to run the “Sync Linked BibTeX File…” command in Bookends every 12 hours. This is the sort of cool thing the *nix foundations and automation in macOS enable…
My nerdishness is a long way from undertaking that sort of thing, but as my Bookends library is actually really small, I’ll just stick with the BibTex, but will see if it will work with it stored on the same cloud service as the library, so that it will be accessible to both machines.
As for the CSL, I’ll either remove that line, or better try commenting out. That way I can see what the default gives, and if I don’t like it look for another more general purpose one like Oxford, Chicago, Harvard… it’s only for private purposes at the moment.
I know this is a bit off-topic, but another little help for the terminal: brew install tldr and then if there is a general terminal command you want help with: e.g. tldr mkdir will give you simplified docs for the mkdir command. The full documentation can be read with the man command: man mkdir. Another quick terminal trick to make man documents easier to use, paste this in your shell:
function mano() {
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
echo -e "No arguments specified. Usage:\n manpdf command";
return 1;
fi
mandoc -T pdf $(man -w $1) | open -fa Preview.app
}
Now type mano mkdir and the man documentation for mkdir opens as a PDF.
Now to infinity and beyond! 
