[GiNaC-list] doxygen, TeX, latex, and pdflatex

[Sheplyakov Alexei]

Hello,

On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 12:19:04AM -0700, Richard Haney wrote:
> It's nice that the INSTALL document now gives at least _some_ "warning"
> about extra software that will be needed for the build, namely:  "To
> build the GiNaC tutorial and reference manual the doxygen utility (it
> can be downloaded from http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen ) and TeX
> are necessary."
 
> But that is all the documentation says about these packages.

> But it also seems that this information, besides being rather scant,
The INSTALL file is [supposed to be] installation manual, so only details
which are really important to get started are given. Since doxygen
is necessary to build *developer* refernce, I don't think the INSTALL
file is correct place to give more information on this subject. And 
those who really interested can just follow the link.

> may also be a bit misleading.
Could you please be more specific? What is exactly misleading?

> I am interested in building the html and pdf documentation for GiNaC.
If you don't have working TeX installation, you'd better donwload PDFs
from GiNaC site. That would save you a *lot* of traffic and time.

> A search through the
> configure output and the config.log output of ginac-1.3.4 suggests that
> configure does not look for any TeX executable or library as such,

I'm sorry to confuse you, but it *does* look for TeX executable[s].

> but instead looks for doxygen, latex, and pdflatex, but no details are
> given there as to what configure specifically is looking for.
It looks for doxygen, latex and pdflatex executables in your $PATH
(surprise?).
 
> To my knowledge, LaTex is a control ("macro" ?) package for TeX --
> actually a substantial family of packages, one of which needs to be
> chosen, but conceivably it could be also have now evolved (with name in
> lower case) into a "stand-alone" executable, which is what the
> configure script seems to be looking for.
Your information is completely correct. latex is simply another name for
TeX executable. Basically, tex preloads tex preloads LaTeX core macro[s]
when invoked as latex. latex (executable file, or symlink, or whatever
it is) is typically a part of TeX installation.

> I also recall that TeX packages are quite varied and can be quite huge
> and thus likely to be much more than is needed here.  Can anyone
> suggest an appropriate TeX package if that is what's needed?  Similar
> considerations apply for LaTeX as well, if that is what's needed.

I haven't tried to build documentation on ReactOS [yet]. On Linux (and
other *NIXes) it used to build with tetex (see
http://www.tug.org/tetex).  No extra packages seems to be necessary.
I'm sorry for a sloppy answer -- I'm not a TeXnician. 


> Also, even though the .info documentation says "Perl is needed by the
> built process as well, since some of the source files are automatically
> generated by Perl scripts.", a case-insensitive grep of
> "C:/gnu/ginac-1.3.5" reveals that "perl" appears only in a few comment
> lines and thus seems to be irrelevant to "ginac-1.3.5".
> 
> Can someone provide some clarification as to what is needed here?
The short answer is: casual user don't need Perl to build GiNaC from
the tarball. The complete answer follows, but if you are not interested
in extending/modifying GiNaC you can skip it.

function.h and function.cpp are created with the Perl script
function.pl. In these files there a lot of constructors of GiNaC::function
are declared/implemented. These constructors allow one to create
GiNaC::function object from one ex, two ex'es, ..., 14 ex'es. If someone
need constructors which take even more arguments, it is possible to modify
$maxargs in function.pl rebuild GiNaC. New versions of function.h and 
function.cpp. will be automagically created/compiled/installed. That
said, I don't think anyone uses this option (IMHO function which
take more than 5 -- 7 arguments is ill-designed).
 




Best regards,
 Alexei.

-- 
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

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