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

[Warren Weckesser]

Richard,

I don't use Windows these days, but when I did, I used MiKTeX:
    www.miktex.org
MiKTeX provides the commands tex, latex, pdflatex (and probably
more).

By the way, since you are using ginac, there is a good chance that
you will eventually want to write about whatever you are doing with
it.  For typesetting mathematics, it is hard to beat latex. For
writing latex documents in Windows, I used to use a nice editor
called winedt (www.winedt.com).  These days I hear texniccenter is
also very good (www.toolscenter.org).

Warren


On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 00:19 -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,
> may also be a bit misleading.
> 
> A case-insensitive "grep" of "C:/gnu/ginac-1.3.5" reveals no occurrence
> of "tex" except as a part of "text" or as a part of variable names such
> as CONFIG_TEX_TRUE, LATEX, and PDFLATEX.  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, but
> instead looks for doxygen, latex, and pdflatex,  but no details are
> given there as to what configure specifically is looking for.
> 
> Then a search for these keywords in the ginac-1.3.5 configure script
> seems to confirm that these packages (as executables with presumably
> several different extensions attempted) are typically searched for in
> the PATH variable (which presumably is the environment variable by that
> name) and that the lines
> 
>   ac_cv_path_DOXYGEN="$DOXYGEN" # Let the user override the test with a
> path.
> 
>   ac_cv_path_LATEX="$LATEX" # Let the user override the test with a
> path.
> 
>   ac_cv_path_PDFLATEX="$PDFLATEX" # Let the user override the test with
> a path.
> 
> allow the user to specify the pathnames for these three executables by
> setting environment variables or using command line arguments, rather
> than having to have the executables "installed" in a PATH directory. 
> (If true, that's nice to know, but I don't recall seeing anything to
> this effect even in the "./configure --help" output.)
> 
> 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.  Moreover, I could find no
> suggestion either in the ginac-1.3.5 configure script or in the
> ginac-1.3.4 output (including config.log) that configure looks for
> anything with a root name of "tex".
> 
> I have no idea what pdflatex is except that it seems likely by its name
> to be some extension of the LaTeX concept for use in creating .pdf
> files.
> 
> But all of this is a lot of guessing based on what I found.
> 
> 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?
> 
> 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 am interested in building the html and pdf documentation for GiNaC.
> 
> Richard Haney
> 
> 
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