Ghostscript problem in the MacTeX 2023

[Richard Koch]

First a note to Norbert; some Mac people do read this site.

To Sarthak,

Thanks for the link to stackexchange, where your problem is carefully documented.
Casual readers of texhax may not have followed that link. If they do, they will
discover that you did not install MacTeX in the standard way, but instead installed using
homebrew. 

There is no connection between the MacTeX team and the homebrew folks. They
take whatever we provide and do "the things they do." In particular, in your
bug report, you write "the documentation doesn't seem to be updated with the
fact that Homebrew's prefix is in /opt/Homebrew for Apple Silicon. So
/usr/local/share should have been /opt/Homebrew/Cellar." We document
what our installer does, but of course do not document the modifications
made by other providers.

I create MacTeX, but I know nothing about how homebrew modifies this
distribution.

I want to emphasize, however, that there is nothing wrong with the process
you used. The only mistake you made is the assumption that the MacTeX
team and the brew team cooperate closely. When you install MacTeX,
TeXShop, LaTeXiT, and Ghostscript all with brew commands, and then
run into trouble, the proper place to ask questions is the brew site.

Let me make a few guesses about what homebrew does.
The following may or may not work.

A standard technique which many users employ is to install
MacTeX directly with our installer, but use the "Custom Install"
mode to skip installation of Ghostscript. Then they install
Ghostscript using homebrew or MacPorts or another Unix
package system. 

When MacTeX installs
ghostscript, it installs two binaries, gs-noX11 and gs-X11,
as you report. I suspect that when homebrew installs ghostscript,
it doesn't do this, but instead assumes that X11 is installed
and just installs a ghostscript which includes X11 support.
I don't know for sure, but that's my guess.

If so, then making LaTeXiT work should be very simple. All you
need to do is to use LaTeXiT preferences to give it a path
to the brew location of ghostscript. When users install the
canonical MacTeX, we handle that automatically. When they
decide to install a Unix package system,
they need to handle this configuration step for ghostscript
themselves..


Richard Koch