From: weiqigao AT crl DOT com ("Weiqi Gao") Subject: Re: newbie question 8 Mar 1997 10:26:18 -0800 Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: <199703081306.AA16012.cygnus.gnu-win32@mail.crl.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Original-To: "'gnu-win32 Mailing List'" X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: Microsoft Internet Mail 4.70.1155 Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Rich Adili wrote: >What's a Unix illiterate gotta do to read the .tex and .texinfo >documentation under Win95? Become Unix literate. :) TeX is a document preparation system written by Donald Knuth in the late 70's and early 80's. It works much like the Java system: You write your source file (filename.tex) with TeX commands, "\input"ing other packages at the beginning if you want. You then run the command "tex" over the source (tex filename.tex) to produce a device independent file (.dvi). This .dvi file can then be interpreted by a dvi driver for a particular device---a printer or a graphic monitor---to render the document on paper or on screen. Most TeX documents uses the LaTeX set of packages. However the GNU system is stuck with a different package called Texinfo. These two packages are orthogonal (mutually exclusive), and most TeX distributions are bundled with only the LaTeX packages. A TeX distribution for DOS called emTeX is available at CTAN: ftp://www.cdrom.com/pub/tex/ctan/systems/msdos/emtex/. Make sure you also get the font for your printer from the emtex-fonts directory. Read through the documentation (especially the quick installation guide) and you could be up and running within hours. Texinfo can be gotton from ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu. It contains on file for you to \input, and it's own index building utility called texindex. There are other "Win32" versions of TeX at the CTAN site (the miktex) port is a good one. But the Windows 95 graphics system is very hostile towards the fonts used in the TeX system (METAFONT fonts instead of True Type or PostScript, METAFONT predates both), so non of these have excellent screen previewers for TeX documents. emTeX includes excellent screen previewers. Incidentally, emTeX is compiled with another port of GNU C/C++. -- Weiqi Gao weiqigao AT crl DOT com - For help on using this list, send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".