Re: Lilypond not rendering PDF on Mac

[Michael Hendry]

> On 8 Jan 2019, at 17:32, Stephen Wilkinson <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Sorry, not sure if I've posted this twice
> 
> I've recently installed Lilypond (2.18.2) onto a new Mac (OS X 14.2),  but 
> have run into a problem at the beginning. Lilypond hangs when rendering a 
> file at the 'Converting to .pdf.' stage. 
> 
> I've tried this both with the default test file and scores I've already got, 
> and both through and without Frescobaldi. I've got it rendering to SVGs as a 
> workaround, but Frescobaldi's handling of them isn't quite as fluent, so it 
> would be nice to be able to make PDFs as normal. Any ideas? Thanks

Hi, Stephen.

This is all sounding very familiar - I switched to Mac in 2013, and I’m sorry 
to say I solved this or a similar problem without taking note of how I did it.

I think it may have had to do with the installation of (the right version of?) 
GhostScript.

I would suggest you check that you can run Lilypond in command-line mode using 
the “-ps” switch to generate a PostScript file.

See: http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/usage.pdf

If that works, and inspection of the resulting .ps file with a text editor 
looks credible, the conversion of PS to PDF is your problem.

You should already have a copy of “ps2pdf” installed, along with lilypond.

Try entering...

which ps2pdf

…on the command-line and see what you get.

On my Mac I get:

| => which ps2pdf
ps2pdf is /usr/local/bin/ps2pdf
ps2pdf is /Applications/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/bin/ps2pdf
ps2pdf is /usr/local/bin/ps2pdf

I’m not sure how lilypond finds ps2pdf (or equivalent) when it converts a PS to 
a PDF file, but if you have a working copy of ps2pdf on your Mac it needs to be 
in the path that lilypond searches for executables.

Sorry not to be more specific, hope this helps.

Regards,

Michael