I give up on [La]TeX. I've found the i-Installer packages for TeX and dependencies, or the source distributions of tetex and tetex-texmf. I've tried the front-ends of TeXShop, iTexMac or LyX. I've read Kevin O'Malley's brief introduction to LaTeX. It all kind of makes sense now, but none of it works very well, a lot of it is out-of-date, and the whole process is totally obscure.
What I want:
- A UNIX-style back-end 'TeX' processing system that installs from source in one go on OS X.
- One configuration GUI for all the [La]TeX settings.
- A WYSIWYG word processor, that defines styles using a plain-text, CSS-like stylesheet, but with the option to view the full code (as in DreamWeaver, for example).
- BibDesk, or something like it, for managing citations.