Guide for adding tools with Quarto

[RaymondBalise]

When I do quarto install tool tinytex I get a message saying:

(\) Updating Path (inspecting 1 possible paths)WARNING: Unable to determine a path to use when installing TeX Live. 
To complete the installation, please run the following:

/Users/me/Library/TinyTeX/bin/universal-darwin/tlmgr option sys_bin <bin_dir_on_path>

I don't know what to use for <bin_dir_on_path>. I am guessing that it wants me to type /Users/me/Library/TinyTeX/bin. Is that correct or does it want me to type the path to my machine's /bin directory?

Currently the quarto docs do not have a section on installing helper tools. The PDF instructions have the line for installing tinytex and the instructions for chromium are buried on the page covering authoring diagrams. Having a page showing how to install/check the addins on Mac, Windows (and perhaps Linux), with the answer to the above question, would be most excellent.

In particular, it would be good to have a gentle introduction (for frightened beginners who don't know what a command line is), dedicated to these lines:

quarto tools install tinytex
quarto tools install chromium
quarto tools check

[dragonstyle]

Hi -

Great feedback, thank you! I'll convert this to an issue to track improving the documentation as you describe.

As far as the specific warning that you're receiving, we need the tlmgr to be available globally in the terminal (somewhere on the system path). We try to figure out a directory on the bin path for you, but in this case we failed. You can see what directories are in your system path using the following command at the terminal:

echo $PATH

which should print a list of directories- use one of these as the bin-dir-on-path. A guess on on that might be present and work /usr/bin.

[RaymondBalise]

Cool. I get

/usr/local/bin /usr/bin /bin /usr/sbin /sbin /opt/X11/bin /Library/Apple/usr/bin

So I will follow your advice and use /usr/bin.

Thank you so much for the fast feedback!

[dragonstyle]

I would use /usr/local/bin if I were you (and be sure that directory exists). I think later version of MacOS might protect /usr/bin ... Hope this helps... - ty for reporting will try to fix this so you don't need to mess with this!