AUCTeX does not recognize texlive installation

Question

I am running Emacs 25 on Kubuntu 17.10.

I have a texlive installation in:

/home/user/texlive/2017/bin/x86_64-linux

echo $PATH produces:

/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/home/user/texlive/2017/bin/x86_64-linux

But out of this, /home/user/texlive/2017/bin/x86_64slinux was added by hand in my ~/.zshrc.

So, I added the following line to my ~/.emacs:

(setenv "PATH" (concat (getenv "PATH") ":/home/user/texlive/2017/bin/x86_64-linux")

Now, (getenv "PATH") shows the full path as mentioned above.

And yet when I try to compile a .tex file using C-c C-a, it produces an error:

AUCTeX cannot find a working TeX distribution.

What is happening? How do I get AUCTeX to compile?

Answer 1

You may have two possible solutions:

a) use the package exec-path-from-shell to add your path in emacs init.el file

b) add/modify this code to your auctex initialization in init.el file (this is mine for mac):

(setenv "PATH" (concat "/Library/TeX/texbin:"
                         (getenv "PATH")))
(add-to-list 'exec-path "/Library/TeX/texbin")

Answer 2

Set the PATH variable in .profile not in .zshrc and remove the change in .emacs. Logout and login again.