Installing PSTricks and using it with TexShop

PSTricks allows drawing of complicated diagrams when using (La)TeX. I've found it especially useful for making probability trees for my courses, though it goes waaaaay beyond such simple things.

This assumes that you haven't customized your setup of teTeX very much (read: at all).

Installation

• Go get a copy of pstricks from CTAN.
• Decompress the archive, be it the gzip or zip archive.
• Open up the readme file, since it gives the full instructions - these are a short list.
• Copy the contents of the generic folder to a tex folder where it can be found. This can be done in several ways.
  • If you want it for all users, put the whole folder in /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/tex/
  • If you want it just for yourself (oink!), put the whole folder in ~/Library/texmf/tex.
Note that if the generic folder already exists, you can call the folder something else and bury it in the generic folder, or call it something informative like pstricks and put it in one of the abovementioned tex folders.
• Copy the contents of the latex folder into a latex folder which hangs off of one of the abovementioned tex folders.

Using with Texshop

If you try to typeset something containing any pstricks, you might get bad-looking items in Texshop, because Texshop uses pdflatex to render the tex files directly to pdf files. There are 2 workarounds (which work so far, but which might not be universally correct):

1. Go to menu itemTypeset -> TeX and Ghostscript before typesetting. This should work, though I suspect there are situations where it will fail (such as when the document has included pdf files).
2. Hack the document file
• Put a \pdfoutput -1 right after the \begin{document} line.
• Clicking the typeset button in Texshop will render the file, but won't display anything. Go to where your files are and double-click either the dvi file which was produced (double-clicking the ps file makes for worse-looking output). This will make the PDF file you were looking for.