Asymptote: Macintosh
Installing Asymptote on a Mac
This tutorial was tested on Mac OS 10.5 "Leopard," but should work for most older systems.
Download the Asymptote source here (at the time of writing, it is version 1.43).
Follow directions in the INSTALL file. The process is summarized here. "x.xx" represents the Asymptote version number (e.g., 1.43), and terminal commands are italicized.
- Open Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
- Run: cd ~/Desktop
- gunzip asymptote-x.xx.src.tgz
- tar -xf asymptote-x.xx.src.tar
- cd asymptote-x.xx
- Download and put this file in the current directory. (In Linux, the command is wget http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/gc_source/gc-7.1.tar.gz --- not tried in Mac, needs verification.)
- ./configure
- make all
- sudo make install
You have finished installing Asymptote.
Usage
Suppose that on the Desktop, you have a file named asyfile.tex
Use whatever LaTeX editor to compile the file. It'll return an error that looks something like this:
Package asymptote Warning: file asyfile_1.pdf does not exist on input line 33.
Terminal again. Run: cd ~/Desktop
then asy asyfile
That will run asymptote on the file asyfile.asy, (created when the tex file was compiled) producing asyfile_1.pdf.
Now run latex on asyfile.tex again, and with any luck, it should compile with no errors.
Automation
This post describes a shell script that automates the compilation process.
