ARM Mac issues with Gregorio in TeX Live 2025

[Justin Davis]

Hello,

I am trying to resolve ongoing issues with the 2025 distribution of Tex Live on an ARM Mac, using TeXShop. I have an older Intel MacBook that took the 2025 update without issue. That computer is currently out of commission, so I am relying on a newer model. It hadn't occurred to me that the hardware might cause issues with LaTeX. 

The previous 2024 distribution of TeX works fine on the ARM Mac. But there are updates that I would like to take advantage of in the current and future distributions. I had downloaded the new distribution earlier in the year. After encountering issues, I rolled it back, and hoped future patches might resolve the issue. With a fresh download, the problems are still there. 

The issues specifically: I receive Runaway argument? warnings and errors when there are seemingly none. A file that will compile without error in the 2024 distribution of LaTeX on the ARM and also in the 2025 version on the Intel computer either fails completely on the ARM Mac, or else will render in scroll mode with inexplicable problems. The biggest issue is that the pdf output will duplicate part of the first page on  the second page and/or it will duplicate individual gabc files or gabcsnippets. A test file I ran with five scores that printed correctly in my 2024 run duplicates two of those scores in the 2025 run (a total of seven). 

Here is an example runaway argument log in Tex 2025 (ARM Mac), for a file that had previously compiled without error on the same machine in Tex 2024: 

Runaway argument?
{Ps. 8 \grecommentary [0.75em]{Ps. 24, 3. \Vbar . 4} \greannotation {\ETC.
./advent_test.tex:86: Paragraph ended before \gre@commentary was complete.
<to be read again>
                   \par
l.86
     
? 

------------------------

A corollary to the above: As a potential workaround, I tried installing an Ubuntu Virtual Machine. After many hours of troubleshooting, I've given up on that. After following the instructions (https://gregorio-project.github.io/installation.html), I still receive this error: 

Module gregoriotex Error: Unable to find gregorio executable.

(gregoriotex)             shell-escape mode may not be activated. Try

(gregoriotex)             

(gregoriotex)             lualatex --shell-escape text.tex

(gregoriotex)             

(gregoriotex)             See the documentation of Gregorio or your TeX

(gregoriotex)             distribution to automatize it. on input line 52

Hopefully someone has encountered/knows of this problem. I saw another user who had the same Gregorio executable error on Ubuntu, but I couldn't extract a fix from that thread. 

Best Regards,

Justin