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I have working for a few years with MacTeX, and I want to update my tex distribution. I would like to install now TeXlive. What should I do with the old MacTeX installation? Do I have to remove it? I am afraid to break things...

bobsacameno
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    Why don't you want to continue with MacTeX? It is literally TeXlive, just with a few addons to make it work smoothly on the mac. And you can distributions from several years co-existing, easily switching between them. – Harald Hanche-Olsen May 05 '20 at 14:07
  • I had a problem recently with the mactex ghostscript when trying to preview equation in emacs. So I read that TeXlive will be able to solve it. – bobsacameno May 05 '20 at 14:13
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    If there is a problem with the mactex ghostscript, that should be reported as a bug. In any case, you can install mactex without ghostscript, and install your own copy of ghostscript outside mactex. That is what I do, using macports. But I am sure you can use homebrew for this purpose as well. – Harald Hanche-Olsen May 05 '20 at 14:27
  • Thanks. I will try to install MacTeX then. – bobsacameno May 05 '20 at 14:38
  • TeX Live and Ghostscript are separate things. MacTeX usually installs the current TeX Live (2020 now) and Ghostscript (9.50 this year) but you can customize the installation to not install either one along. However you must be running macOS High Sierra (10.13) or later to use the MacTeX installer package. By the way, what problem are you having with Ghostscript? – Herb Schulz May 05 '20 at 14:44
  • I am using emacs to write in Latex, and the preview of equations did not work. I saw that this is due to a conflict of ghostscript with MacTeX which could be avoided by using TeXlive or simply opting out of ghostscript as you mentioned. – bobsacameno May 05 '20 at 14:52
  • What kind of equations needed Ghostscript? Where did you see that explanation? – Herb Schulz May 05 '20 at 17:34
  • To preview equations the emacs makes images out of the latex equations, and then displays them. See for example in this question – bobsacameno May 05 '20 at 18:35

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