Setting up Emacs, AucTeX and (La)TeX on Mac OSX

[D. D. Brierton]

Apologies for cross-posting to comp.text.tex and the Emacs groups. Please
prune/set follow-ups accordingly.

A friend of mine has decided at a very late stage of writing up her PhD
thesis to switch from MS Word to LaTeX. She's a Mac user, using the latest
OSX. As I wrote my thesis in LaTeX using Emacs/AucTeX I've offered to help
her out. The trouble is that she's a Mac user who knows next to nothing about
Unix, and I'm a Unix (specifically Linux) user who knows next to nothing
about Macs. As this is quite late in the day for her to be doing this
(although it is almost certainly necessary) I was wondering if someone out
there might be able to point me in the direction of some how-tos, or even hold
my (our) hand through this.

First questions: is it best (or necessary) to install the X server Apple
recently released, or are there native Aqua builds of Emacs and whatever DVI
viewers she might need (I guess that if she just uses pdflatex then she can
just use Aqua's native PDF rendering for previewing?)?

Next question: are there nice prebuilt binary packages which we can download
and install, or do we need to build from source, and if so, does the
bog-standard OSX install contain all the necessary developer tools?

Last (for now): how similar are the standard install paths on OSX to Linux?
Can I just make install auctex into /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp? And do
whatever LaTeX macros she needs go into ~/texmf?

If there is a better place to post ask this kind of thing (e.g. an Aqua/OSX
for Linux users newsgroup) then please let me know.

TIA, Darren

-- 
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D. D. Brierton            darren@dzr-web.com           www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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