4 Installation and use under Windows

This section only applies to systems running Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2K or XP.

It is also necessary to have your Windows set up so that it uses the Microsoft Joliet extensions for reading CD-ROMs; simply look at the CD-ROM in Explorer and see whether it shows long, mixed-case, file names. If it does not, you cannot use the ready-to-run system on the CD-ROM.

This Win32 TeX systems includes a dvi previewer, Windvi, which is similar in usage to the established Unix xdvi. The documentation can be found in texmf/doc/html/windvi/windvi.html.

4.1 The TeXLive.exe program

Figure 4:

“Welcome to TeX Live” window

If your computer is configured to let the CD-ROM autostart, then a dialog box with a menu bar will popup on the screen, and you will have several choices from there:

Install TeX on your hard disk,
Install TeX-oriented editors on your hard disk,
Install support packages on your hard disk (Ghostscript, NetPBM, . . . )
Do some maintenance on you TeX system,
Remove the TeX system,
Use TeX off the CD-ROM,
Cleanup the temporary files created on your hard disk when using TeX off the CD-ROM,
Update some of the DLLs on your system,
Browse some documentation: TeX Live documentation, TUG web pages, fpTeX web pages,
Run the TeXdocTK application to find specific documentation.

If your CD-ROM does not autostart, you can explicitly run the program by double clicking on bin/win32/TeXLive.exe on the CD-ROM from the explorer window.

4.2 Running from the CD-ROM

You can run all the TeX programs directly off the CD-ROM, and have access to all the macros and fonts immediately, at the price of a slower performance than if you install on the hard disk. To work effectively, one needs to modify environment variables and to create some small auxiliary directories on a hard disk. These directories will contain necessary configuration files allowing the user to modify programs settings and to generate a necessary format file. Moreover, automatically generated font files will be stored there too.

Should you want to run TeX this way, you will have to follow these steps:

from the menu, chose Explore CD-Rom, then Select a text editor, a dialog box will open to select some .exe program.

This program needs to be a TeX oriented editor. It must be able to run the TeX compiler, previewer and any other needed tool. If you don’t have one already installed on your system, you can install one from the CD-ROM, details section 4.3.

There is no way we can guess if the program you will select is actually a text editor, so be careful. Here is a list of frequently used TeX editors:

GNU Emacs	c:\Program Files\NTEmacs\bin\runemacs.exe
XEmacs	c:\Program Files\XEmacs\XEmacs-21.2\i586-pc-win32\xemacs.exe
WinShell	c:\Program Files\WinShell\WinShell.exe
WinEdt	c:\Program Files\WinEdt Team\WinEdt\WinEdt.exe
TeXnicCenter	c:\Program Files\TeXnicCenter\TEXCNTR.exe

The program selected will be memorized as the editor to use for future runs.

from the menu, chose Explore CD-Rom, then Run TeX off CD-Rom. The environment will be modified, a small temporary directory created and some configuration files copied there. Then, the selected editor selected will be launched, and you will be able to type in some text, let TeX typeset it and the view it or print it.
If Ghostscript is not detected on your machine, you will be warned that rendering your DVI files might fail. You can install it from the Install, Support menu item. See section 4.3 for details.
you can select a different text editor any time you want.
if you chose Cleanup CD-Rom setup, everything TeX needed will be removed, comprised the selection of your text editor, but not the extra packages you may have downloaded and installed. If you installed WinShell or NTEmacs, they won’t be removed.

The editor is run inside a modified environment. A temporary TDS compliant texmf tree is build in the temporary area of your computer. It is needed to store files that may be build on the fly like pk font files or format files. Configuration files are copied from the CD-ROM to this texmf tree, so that you can edit them if needed. The ls-R database is computed for this texmf tree. Then the PATH and TEXMFCNF environment variables are set locally, and the editor is run in this local environment. From within your editor², you have access to a full TeX Live environment, all files referenced on the CD-ROM.

[For advanced users:] You can also use the small batch file mkloctex.batto be called in a directory setupw32of the CD-ROM. From the Start menu select ‘Run’, then browse CD drive and select mkloctex.bat. Before starting it, you should add two parameters separated by a space: the letter of your CD drive and the letter of the hard disk where you want to install the TeX directory. The whole line should read, e.g., d:\setupw32\mkloctex.bat d c. When installation is complete, please read carefully the information on screen. If you are running Windows 9x/ME, then you will have to restart Windows.

4.3 Installing editors or support packages

You can already use the TeXSetup.exe program to install a single, not TeX dependent package. This might be either an editor like WinShell or NTEmacs, or also a support package like NetPBM (graphics formats conversion) or Ghostscript.

Some of the packages are not free, or not with the same meaning as for the rest of the CD-ROM. These packages have been made available through the Internet. You need to enable an Internet connection in order to install them. Chosing the Enable Internet access subitem will search your system for an active Internet connection, or start one if possible. If your computer is not connected to the Internet, then the timeout might be long, 30s or more. So try to enable it only if you know you have a connection.

Only a few packages are available from the CD-ROM, but the most important of them: NTEmacs and WinShell for the editors, Ghostscript and NetPBM for the other support packages. NetPBM is needed for running TeX4ht.

The downloadable packages are sometimes huge: Perl is 10Mb, XEmacs is 50Mb, so be warned that it can take a lot of time to install such things. TeXSetup.exe does not yet provide an estimation of the time needed to complete the download.

When installing these packages, TeXSetup is working in unattended mode. However, the programs that have their own installer like WinEdt or Ghostscript for example will require human interaction.

Those packages who have no specific installer will be unpacked and configured for your system. You will be required to select some directory where they will be installed. The directory to select should be the root directory of the whole installation. Assuming you want to install NTEmacs and NetPBM, the archive files already contain the NTEmacs\ and NetPBM\ part, so the directory you have to select is something like c:\Local or c:\Program Files.

4.4 Installing to your hard disk

Installation is started by letting the CD autostart, and selecting the item Install from the menu, then the subitem TeXLive. This will invoke the TeXSetup.exe. You can also find it in the bin/win32 directory and run it. TeXSetup.exe is a Windows wizard and it will display several pages while running.

Welcome Page

You can choose a quick installation from there, in this case, the installation will run without any human assistance from beginning to end, with all the default settings (Figure 5, at the top). However, if you chose to install any support program that has its own installer like WinEdt or Ghostscript, your intervention might be required. If you have enough privileges (administrator or power user rights) under a Windows version where it is applicable, then you can decide to install the TeX Live for all users or for yourself only by checking the appropriate box.

The TeXSetup Wizard Source directories for the TeX Live files

Figure 5:

The TeX Live setup wizard

Source Page

This page is a bit complex. It will allow you to select two source directories for your TeX Live system (Figure 5, at the bottom). You will need a local source directory and possibly a remote source directory.

Why do we need both these directories? The very files of the TeX Live system are on the CD-ROM, but some other packages useful under a Win32 system are not, either because of space lacking or because their license was not compatible with the TeX Live’s one. You need to enable Internet downloading if you want to install these support packages.

However, don’t panic: the default parameters of the setup will allow you to install a full system using the CD-ROM only. Simply, you won’t have WinEdt for example, but you will be able to install it later.

So you can take your files from:

the CD-ROM or any similar flat tree of files, available through some standard directory (this means the CD-ROM can be mounted on some remote machine and be made available through network sharing),
a set of .zip files (this is the case when you are installing the fpTeX distribution),
the Internet, in this case, the program takes care of downloading the .zip files it needs for you.

This option is available only if you enable Internet file downloading in the right part of the page. You also need to configure this Internet access by selecting to connect either using Internet Explorer 5 wininet.dll, or using a direct connection (ftp, http).

Root Page

On this page, you will tell where you want the files to be installed (Figure 6, at the top). Only the root directory really matters, the other ones are set according to the root one. You may want to make $TEXMFEXTRA point to some TDS compliant directory with other TeX files or assign a different value to $HOMETEXMF, which is set by default to whatever Windows think is your ‘HOME’ location.

Root and directories Scheme selection

Figure 6:

TeX Live-Setup: Root and directories / Schemes

Get TPM Page

This page does not require any manual intervention. The .tpm files which describe collections and packages are retrieved (possibly from the Internet), unzipped if needed and parsed.

Schemes Page

On this page, you will select the global scheme of your installation (Figure 6, at the bottom). A scheme is a large set of files targeted at some kind of usage. There are 3 generic schemes for basic, recommended and full installation. The other ones are devoted to LUGs (what GUST or GUTenberg propose for their members) or applications (XML and TeX). When a scheme is selected, it is still possible to refine the selection by checking the appropriate box. If doing so, you will be presented the packages page to change your selection, else you will jump to the review page.

Packages Page

Collections and packages are presented in a tree form (Figure 7, at the top). The links in the tree are dependency links. Collections depend on packages and maybe other collections, and it is the same for each package. You can select any package or collection individually, but your request will be granted only if the object is not requested by another one which is selected. For example, you can’t deselect tex-basic without deselecting all the collections that request it.

The win32-support collection displayed on the picture is Win32 specific. It holds a number of bonus packages (Figure 7, at the bottom) which can be installed automatically and individually: Ghostscript, the PostScript interpreter, TeX oriented editors, tools like Perl, LaTeX2HTML, etc. None of these packages are selected by default. Some of them have an Internet Explorer icon on their right, this means that they are not on the CD-ROM and they will be available only if you previously enabled Internet downloading. This collection cannot be selected entirely at once: you need to select the packages individually. This is to avoid unwanted downloads of huge files.

On this page, you also have the information about disk space needed, for each object, and for the set of those who are selected, and also the disk space available on the partition selected for the installation. Last, you can choose to install or not the documentation files and source files associated with each package.

Review Page

You will find there a summary of your choices (Figure 8, at the top). It is still time to go back to change them.

Packages Page Win32 Support

Figure 7:

Packages Page / Win32 goodies

Files Copy Page

The selected files are copied on your hard disk (Figure 8, at the bottom). All the files not yet available on your local disk are first downloaded from the remote source directory on the Internet. Then every package is unpacked (if .zip files), or copied from the CD-ROM.

Configuration Page

Several packages need some configuration step to make them usable (Figure 9, at the top). Also the TeX Live system needs some post-processing step (format files generation, ls-R databases generation, environment variables, etc.). All these operations are done there, some of them can be lengthy.

Review Page File Copy Page

Figure 8:

Review Page / File Copy Page

Final Page

The installation being over, you may want to display the Windows specific documentation (HTML format) and / or the log file of the setup process (Figure 9 at the bottom). If it is needed (Win9x/WinME), you will be asked to reboot your computer.

Configuration Page Final Page

Figure 9:

Configuration Page / Final page

Please be aware that the choice of cluster size on DOS disk partitions can radically affect the size of your TeX installation. The support tree has hundreds of small files, and it is not unusual for a complete installation to take up to 4 times the amount of space used on the CD-ROM.

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