Stefano Franchi wrote:
What I mean is that in View menu I only have one item "PDF (pdflatex)" .
Similarly, in the File>Export menu I LaTeX and PDF(pdflatex). And
nothing else. No DVI, dvipdfm, etc.
If you can view DVIs but not PDFs with the DVI->PS->PDF route, then
the next question is whether you can view/export PDFs using pdflatex
or dvipdfm?
I cannot view DVIs. All I can do is view PDFs via the pdflatex route.
Which has been all I needed so far, that's why I never bothered
recovering the other options.
Ok, this sounds strongly as though LyX cannot find a working copy of
LaTeX. Without being able to run LaTeX (or more precisely without
knowing it can run LaTeX), LyX will not show any export or view options
that rely on LaTeX. Viewing and exporting LaTeX files themselves do not
rely on having a copy of LaTeX; these options always exist, since the
code to produce LaTeX output is internal to LyX. Being able to view or
export PDFs via the pdflatex route relies on having a working copy of
pdflatex but not on having a working copy of LaTeX.
You indicated that you had TeTeX installed. The first step is to verify
that you can run latex from a command shell. At this point, it gets
difficult for me to advise you, since I'm not a Mac user. There's a
script named 'configure' lurking in a folder under the LyX installation
folder (on Windows it would be in <LyX directory>\Resources\lyx, but
I'm not sure if that holds for Macs). If you can run it from a command
shell, you should be able to watch the progress messages.
Edit->Reconfigure runs the same script from inside LyX, but at least on
Windows you cannot see the messages unless you ran LyX in debug mode.
Early on the script will output "checking for a LaTeX2e program" and
then report on whether it found one or not, and if it did whether the
one it found works or not. If the answer is no, that at least confirms
that failure to find LaTeX is the problem.
One last tip: I once ran into a problem with LyX failing to detect a
working LaTeX, even though I had MiKTeX properly installed. It turned
out that I also had Cygwin installed, including a nonfunctioning (or not
fully functioning) latex.exe executable, and the Cygwin version of
latex.exe preceded the MiKTeX version of latex.exe on the command path.
Others have reported a similar problem. So if you have more than one
copy of latex.exe on your system, make sure that LyX sees the right one
first.
HTH,
Paul
