DOCSLIB.ORG

A Tetex-Based Distribution for Windows

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
A Tetex-Based Distribution for Windows fpTEX: A teTEX-based Distribution for Windows Fabrice Popineau Sup´elec 2 rue E. Belin F-57070 Metz France [email protected] http://www.ese-metz.fr/~popineau Abstract This paper deals with the ins and outs of porting the widely used teTEX distribu- tion to the Windows environment. The choices made and difficulties experienced are related, a brief description of this huge distribution is given and the future work is sketched out. Motivation Some of the nicest features of emTEX, such as its dvipm previewer, were not available to Windows users. Context. More and more people need to use some Moreover, emT X’s author, Eberhard Mattes, never sort of Microsoft environment, perhaps because of E released his sources. office suite or the like, or because of management At the same time, MiKT X began to mature. staff decisions. Some of the greatest pieces of soft- E Christian Schenk, author of MiKT X, has followed ware have been developed on UNIX (or other oper- E a different way. He has designed a completely new ating system) well before the general availability of Win32-oriented T X distribution. Looking at his Windows. Thus, software such as T X should be E E work, I questioned the usefulness of porting Web2C available on Microsoft operating systems, natively to Win32, but there were some reasons to do so: ported, and compatible with implementations on other operating systems. TEX by itself is largely Compatibility. Having a Windows TEX distribu- platform independent but achieving complete com- tion based on exactly the same files as the UNIX patibility for an entire distribution is better. one means you can share resources. For exam- The Web2C TEX distribution is one of the great- ple, you can not only share texmf trees across est TEX implementations and has support for porta- the network but also configuration and format bility. Moreover, Web2C is the base of the widely files. used teTEX distribution for UNIX.NowthatUNIX Portability. Most of the ongoing developments and Windows can easily share files across the net- around TEX are done with UNIX Web2C (see work, thanks to tools such as Samba, it is most de- pdfTEXor"-TEX). Being able to share source sirable to have not a teTEX-like TEX distribution files means less efforts to compile a new release. for Windows, but the actual teTEX distribution for There is another consequence: on several occa- Windows. sions, it has proven to be useful to compile the source code on something really different from Free TEX for Windows. In the fall of 1997, when UNIX. Errors that do not show up on one plat- I began to port Web2C to Win32, one main TEX dis- form may do so on another one. tribution was available to Windows users: emTEX. This is still a great TEX environment but it was de- Usability. Lots of people are familiar with teTEX signed for MS-DOS first and then for OS/2.So,when under UNIX. Having the very same distribution Windows became 32-bit-aware,1 those MS-DOS ap- under Windows is a plus. plications could not benefit from the new 32-bit flat The plan. The porting tasks can be divided as fol- mode, or at least not optimally. The so-called DOS- 2 lows. Note, however, that the job was not formally extenders were not as smart as they are today. planned at all since it had to be done using mostly 1 In fact, even if Windows 9x can run 32-bit mode appli- spare time. So the project has followed a circu- NT cations, only the Windows incarnation of Windows is a lar technique, with some issues only being resolved true 32-bit environment; see section about the previewer 2 For example, support for long filenames was not avail- quite recently. Below is a very short description of able at first. the next sections. 290 TUGboat, Volume 20 (1999), No. 3 — Proceedings of the 1999 Annual Meeting fpTEX: A teTEX-based Distribution for Windows Command-line programs. The first goal was to { gsftopk and ps2pk to rasterize Type 1 have a tex.exe running under the Win32 API fonts to PK files (Application Programming Interface), the set of { mktex* support programs for generating functions that implement the kpathsea library. missing font files and fmtutil for building Compilation environment. teTEXusesapower- formats ful tool called autoconf. This tool relies heavily • a DVI file viewer based on xdvi, but adapted to on having a UNIX shell and lots of UNIX utili- Windows ties such as sed, grep, awk, and so on. Clearly, • packages found on the TEX-Live CD such as: this is not something easy to find and run under { dvipdfm, to convert DVI files to PDF Windows. { tex4ht and tth, to convert TEX files to Shell issues. Moreover, the source distribution uses HTML some shell scripts at run-time.Itisnotwise DVI to suppose that the end-user will have a UNIX { extra tools to deal with either files, shell on a Windows machine. PostScript files or fonts. • Operating system-specific. Some issues like find- extra packages found only on the Win32 section CD ing a replacement for file links or naming files of the TEX-Live : on the network have been solved recently. The { ttf2pk and ttfdump will handle TTF fonts question of using the registry is also mentioned. { hbf2gf will handle East-Asian fonts Previewer. No TEX distribution would be com- { gzip and jpeg2ps, which can be handy DVI plete without a previewer. So the port of • the teTEX texmf tree, which is not the least xdvi was contemplated. important part! Installation. This is the trickiest part. Binary dis- tributions were not common under UNIX but Command-line programs they are under Windows, and the installation The process. The Web2C distribution integrates process is very different. all TEX-related tools around one main library called Configuration. The process of configuring Web2C kpathsea. It was devised by Karl Berry to face is very simple because it consists mainly of edit- the growing number of environment variables needed ing text files or setting up environment vari- to set up a complete TEX distribution. Instead of ables. The teTEX distribution introduces a smart setting environment variables, the path values and tool to administer the system, and this task can many other constants are looked for in a configu- be rendered in a Windows-oriented way as well. ration file. This guarantees extensibility and is far Future work. There are many points that can be easier to maintain. enhanced and some will be done in the very near The second point is the process of compiling future. TEX itself. The Web2C distribution owes its name from the Web ! C translator that converts the orig- However, if tasks such as editing a text file, set- inal Web code to C programs. Basically, the follow- ting environment variables or unpacking an archive ing tools were needed: are usual in the UNIX world, they are not usual any- • a C compiler targetting the Win32 API and, more in the Windows, world where end-users expect if possible, supporting the standard C library automatic or point-and-click things to happen. So functions; the installation and configuration parts are very spe- • UNIX cific to Windows. some tools such as sed, grep and awk; • the Perl language, which has proven to be useful The contents of the distribution to put glue between many parts of the building Before discussing the porting issues, here is a brief process, due to the lack of a shell with real pro- outline of what is in the distribution: gramming capabilities under Windows. • Web2C base distribution: TEX, METAFONT, Choosing a compiler. The availability of GCC — METAPOST, DVIware and fontware tools or rather of a native Win32 GCC — under Windows is quite recent. Moreover, GCC in its Cygwin3 incar- • each TEX extension or package that is found in nation has some drawbacks under Windows: teTEX: 3 { "-T X, pdfT X, Ω (Omega) Most of the GNU tools have been ported to Win32 by E E Cygnus Software and their port is under the GNU Public { dvipsk and dviljk to print DVI files Licence. See http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/. TUGboat, Volume 20 (1999), No. 3 — Proceedings of the 1999 Annual Meeting 291 Fabrice Popineau • Every program is linked to a DLL (Dynamically • popen() is available only for command-line pro- Linked Library) that emulates UNIX calls; this grams but fails for graphical programs (the pre- slows down somewhat programs doing intensive viewer uses this call!). 4 file system calls, for example. • stat() fails to recognize directories if their name • At the time I began the Web2C port, this DLL has a trailing / . was not stable at all. All these problems have workarounds using the Win32 • GCC Benchmarks on the same computer using calls instead of the standard C calls. under Linux and the Microsoft compiler under NT have shown up to 20% less time on the same Compilation environment runs in favor of the Microsoft compiler.5 In order to make the build process safer and closer Thus, the Microsoft compiler was chosen. The gen- to what happens under UNIX, a number of decisions eral philosophy was to stick to the Win32 API as had to be made. much as possible and avoid any layer to handle the translation, which might alter performance. Makefiles. Every UNIX Makefile comes in a gener- Many of the auxiliary tools needed for the build ic shape, Makefile.in, that needs to be instantiated UNIX process were available either through the GNU- by the complex process of autoconf.The Win32 Cygnus project or from previous ports to MS- Makefile.in is assembled and processed by the m4 DOS; however, almost none of them were available macro processor to generate the actual Makefile natively ported to Win32.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • X E TEX Live
    X TE EX Live Jonathan Kew SIL International Horsleys Green High Wycombe Bucks HP14 3XL, England jonathan_kew (at) sil dot org 1 X TE EX in TEX Live in the preamble are sufficient to set the typefaces through- out the document. ese fonts were installed by simply e release of TEX Live 2007 marked a milestone for the dropping the .otf or .ttf files in the computer’s Fonts X TE EX project, as the first major TEX distribution to in- folder; no .tfm, .fd, .sty, .map, or other TEX-related files clude X TE EX (version 0.996) as an integral part. Prior to had to be created or installed. this, X TE EX was a tool that could be added to a TEX setup, Release 0.996 of X T X also provides some enhance- but version and configuration differences meant that it was E E ments over earlier, pre-T X Live versions. In particular, difficult to ensure smooth integration in all cases, and it was E there are new primitives for low-level access to glyph infor- only available for users who specifically chose to seek it out mation (useful during font development and testing); some and install it. (One exception to this is the MacTEX pack- preliminary support for the use of OpenType math fonts age, which has included X TE EX for the past year or so, but (such as the Cambria Math font shipped with MS Office this was just one distribution on one platform.) Integration 2007); and a variety of bug fixes.
    [Show full text]
  • DE-Tex-FAQ (Vers. 72
    Fragen und Antworten (FAQ) über das Textsatzsystem TEX und DANTE, Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TEX e.V. Bernd Raichle, Rolf Niepraschk und Thomas Hafner Version 72 vom September 2003 Dieser Text enthält häufig gestellte Fragen und passende Antworten zum Textsatzsy- stem TEX und zu DANTE e.V. Er kann über beliebige Medien frei verteilt werden, solange er unverändert bleibt (in- klusive dieses Hinweises). Die Autoren bitten bei Verteilung über gedruckte Medien, über Datenträger wie CD-ROM u. ä. um Zusendung von mindestens drei Belegexem- plaren. Anregungen, Ergänzungen, Kommentare und Bemerkungen zur FAQ senden Sie bit- te per E-Mail an [email protected] 1 Inhalt Inhalt 1 Allgemeines 5 1.1 Über diese FAQ . 5 1.2 CTAN, das ‚Comprehensive TEX Archive Network‘ . 8 1.3 Newsgroups und Diskussionslisten . 10 2 Anwendervereinigungen, Tagungen, Literatur 17 2.1 DANTE e.V. 17 2.2 Anwendervereinigungen . 19 2.3 Tagungen »geändert« .................................... 21 2.4 Literatur »geändert« .................................... 22 3 Textsatzsystem TEX – Übersicht 32 3.1 Grundlegendes . 32 3.2 Welche TEX-Formate gibt es? Was ist LATEX? . 38 3.3 Welche TEX-Weiterentwicklungen gibt es? . 41 4 Textsatzsystem TEX – Bezugsquellen 45 4.1 Wie bekomme ich ein TEX-System? . 45 4.2 TEX-Implementierungen »geändert« ........................... 48 4.3 Editoren, Frontend-/GUI-Programme »geändert« .................... 54 5 TEX, LATEX, Makros etc. (I) 62 5.1 LATEX – Grundlegendes . 62 5.2 LATEX – Probleme beim Umstieg von LATEX 2.09 . 67 5.3 (Silben-)Trennung, Absatz-, Seitenumbruch . 68 5.4 Seitenlayout, Layout allgemein, Kopf- und Fußzeilen »geändert« . 72 6 TEX, LATEX, Makros etc. (II) 79 6.1 Abbildungen und Tafeln .
    [Show full text]
  • Tlaunch: a Launcher for a TEX Live System
    TLaunch: a launcher for a TEX Live system Siep Kroonenberg June 29, 2017 This manual is for tlaunch, the TEX Live Launcher, version 0.5.3. Copyright © 2017 Siep Kroonenberg. Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved. This file is offered as-is, without any warranty. Contents 1 The launcher5 1.1 Introduction............................5 1.1.1 Localization........................6 1.2 Modes...............................6 1.2.1 Normal mode.......................6 1.2.2 Initializing.........................6 1.2.3 Forgetting.........................6 1.3 Using scripts............................7 1.4 The ini file.............................7 1.4.1 Location..........................7 1.4.2 Encoding..........................7 1.4.3 Syntax...........................7 1.4.4 The Strings section....................9 1.4.5 Sections for filetype associations (FTAs)........9 1.4.6 Sections for utility scripts................ 10 1.4.7 The built-in functions.................. 10 1.4.8 Menus and buttons.................... 11 1.4.9 The General section.................... 12 1.5 Editor choice............................ 12 1.6 Launcher-based installations................... 13 1.6.1 The tlaunchmode script................. 14 1.6.2 TEX Live Manager..................... 14 2 The launcher at the RUG 15 2.1 Historical.............................. 15 2.2 RES desktops........................... 16 2.3 Components of the rug TEX installation............ 16 2.4 Directory organization...................... 17 2.5 Fixes for add-ons......................... 17 2.5.1 TeXnicCenter....................... 17 2.5.2 TeXstudio......................... 18 2.5.3 SumatraPDF........................ 18 2.5.4 LyX............................. 18 3 CONTENTS 4 2.6 Moving the XeTEX font cache.................
    [Show full text]
  • Travels in TEX Land: Choosing a TEX Environment for Windows
    The PracTEX Journal TPJ 2005 No 02, 2005-04-15 Rev. 2005-04-17 Travels in TEX Land: Choosing a TEX Environment for Windows David Walden The author of this column wanders through world of TEX, as a non-expert, reporting what he observes and learns, which hopefully will be interesting to other non-expert users of TEX. 1 Introduction This column recounts my experiences looking at and thinking about different ways TEX is set up for users to go through the document-composition to type- setting cycle (input and edit, compile, and view or print). First, I’ll describe my own experience randomly trying various TEX environments. I suspect that some other users have had a similar introduction to TEX; and perhaps other users have just used the environment that was available at their workplace or school. Then I’ll consider some categories for thinking about options in TEX setups. Last, I’ll suggest some follow-on steps. Since I use Microsoft Windows as my computer operating system, this note focuses on environments that are available for Windows.1 2 My random path to choosing a TEX environment 2 I started using TEX in the late 1990s. 1But see my offer in Section 4. 2 While I started using TEX, I switched from TEX to using LATEX as soon as I discovered LATEX existed. Since both TEX and LATEX are operated in the same way, I’ll mostly refer to TEX in this note, since that is the more basic system. c 2005 David C. Walden I don’t quite remember my first setup for trying TEX.
    [Show full text]
  • About Basictex-2021
    About BasicTeX-2021 Richard Koch January 2, 2021 1 Introduction Most TeX distributions for Mac OS X are based on TeX Live, the reference edition of TeX produced by TeX User Groups across the world. Among these is MacTeX, which installs the full TeX Live as well as front ends, Ghostscript, and other utilities | everything needed to use TeX on the Mac. To obtain it, go to http://tug.org/mactex. 2 Basic TeX BasicTeX (92 MB) is an installation package for Mac OS X based on TeX Live 2021. Unlike MacTeX, this package is deliberately small. Yet it contains all of the standard tools needed to write TeX documents, including TeX, LaTeX, pdfTeX, MetaFont, dvips, MetaPost, and XeTeX. It would be dangerous to construct a new distribution by going directly to CTAN or the Web and collecting useful style files, fonts and so forth. Such a distribution would run into support issues as the creators move on to other projects. Luckily, the TeX Live install script has its own notion of \installation packages" and collections of such packages to make \installation schemes." BasicTeX is constructed by running the TeX Live install script and choosing the \small" scheme. Thus it is a subset of the full TeX Live with exactly the TeX Live directory structure and configuration scripts. Moreover, BasicTeX contains tlmgr, the TeX Live Manager software introduced in TeX Live 2008, which can install additional packages over the network. So it will be easy for users to add missing packages if needed. Since it is important that the install package come directly from the standard TeX Live distribution, I'm going to explain exactly how I installed TeX to produce the install package.
    [Show full text]
  • Tugboat, Volume 33 (2012), No. 1 53 TEX on Windows: Miktex Or TEX Live? Joseph Wright on Windows, There Are Two Actively-Develop
    TUGboat, Volume 33 (2012), No. 1 53 TEX on Windows: MiKTEX or TEX Live? A reminder that MiKTEX and TEX Live are not the only choices. W32TEX (Kakuto, 2012) is popular Joseph Wright in the far east. As well as being a TEX system in On Windows, there are two actively-developed free its own right, it is the source of the Windows binar- TEX systems with similar coverage: MiKTEX (Schenk, ies for TEX Live, and TEX Live acquires more CJK 2011) and TEX Live (TEX Users Group, 2011). The support from it every year. For users focussed on good news is that there is a lot of similarity between ConTEXt, ConTEXt standalone (Pragma ADE, 2012) the two systems, so for most users both systems is probably the best way to go (it uses the W32TEX are equally usable, and (LA)TEX documents are port- binaries on Windows). There are also the commer- able between them. However, there are differences cial options, for example BaKoMa TEX (BaKoMa and depending on what you need these might be Soft., 2011) or PCTEX (Personal TEX, Inc., 2011). important. However, for most users it comes down to a choice between the ‘big two’. • The default settings install everything for TEX Live, but only a minimal set of packages for References MiKT X. MiKT X will then install extra pack- E E BaKoMa Soft. “BaKoMa T X 9.77”. ages ‘on the fly’, while T X Live does not (there E E http://www.bakoma-tex.com/, 2011. is a package to do that in TEX Live, but it is aimed at GNU/Linux users).
    [Show full text]
  • TEX-Collection 2003 the TEX Live Guide Sebastian Rahtz, Editor [email protected]
    TEX-Collection 2003 The TEX Live Guide Sebastian Rahtz, editor [email protected] http://tug.org/texlive/ TEX Collection TEX Live + CTAN 2CDs+DVD Edition 9/2003 DANTE e.V. Postfach 10 18 40 69008 Heidelberg [email protected] www.dante.de Editor of TEX Live: Sebastian Rahtz – http://www.tug.org/texlive Editor of CTAN snapshot: Manfred Lotz – http://www.ctan.org AsTEX – CervanTEX – CSTUG – CTUG – CyrTUG – DK-TUG – Estonian User Group – εφτ – GUit – GUST – GUTenberg – GUTpt – ITALIC – KTUG – Lietuvos TEX’o Vartotoju˛Grupe˙ – MaTEX – Nordic TEX Group – NTG – TEXCeH – TEX México – Tirant lo TEX – TUG – TUGIndia – TUG-Philippines – UK TUG – ViêtTUG Documentation contacts: Czech/Slovak Petr Sojka [email protected] Janka Chlebíková chlebikj (at) dcs.fmph.uniba.sk English Karl Berry [email protected] French Fabrice Popineau [email protected] German Volker RW Schaa [email protected] Polish Staszek Wawrykiewicz [email protected] Russian Boris Veytsman [email protected] 9 January 2004 1 CONTENTS 2 Contents 1 Introduction 3 1.1 Basic usage of TEX Live ................................... 3 1.2 Getting help .......................................... 3 2 Structure of TEX Live 4 2.1 Multiple distributions: live, inst, demo ............................ 4 2.2 Top level directories ...................................... 5 2.3 Extensions to TEX ....................................... 5 2.4 Other notable programs in TEX Live ............................. 5 3 Unix installation 6 3.1 Running TEX Live directly from media (Unix) ........................ 6 3.2 Installing TEX Live to disk .................................. 8 3.3 Installing individual packages to disk ............................. 10 4 Post-installation 12 4.1 The texconfig program .................................... 12 4.2 Testing the installation .................................... 13 5 Mac OS X installation 14 5.1 i-Installer: Internet installation ...............................
    [Show full text]
  • Editorial Manager 1
    LaTeX Guide, FAQs, and Resources for EM/PM (Updated May 2021) Aries Systems Corporation 50 High Street, Suite 21 • North Andover, MA 01845 PH +1 978.975.7570 CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY Copyright © 2021, Aries Systems Corporation This document is the confidential and proprietary information of Aries Systems Corporation, and may not be disseminated or copied without the express written permission of Aries Systems Corporation. The information contained in this document is tentative, and is provided solely for planning purposes of the recipient. The features described for this software release are likely to change before the release design and content are finalized. Aries Systems Corporation assumes no liability or responsibility for decisions made by third parties based upon the contents of this document, and shall in no way be bound to performance therefore. Contents LaTeX Guide: Submitting LaTeX Files to Editorial Manager ............................................... 1 Quick troubleshooting............................................................................................................................ 1 Recommended upload order of LaTeX submission files ...................................................... 1 Submission process ................................................................................................................................ 2 Frequently Asked Questions ........................................................................................................ 5 Which TeX system is included in EM?
    [Show full text]
  • The TEX Live Guide TEX Live 2012
    The TEX Live Guide TEX Live 2012 Karl Berry, editor http://tug.org/texlive/ June 2012 Contents 1 Introduction 2 1.1 TEX Live and the TEX Collection...............................2 1.2 Operating system support...................................3 1.3 Basic installation of TEX Live.................................3 1.4 Security considerations.....................................3 1.5 Getting help...........................................3 2 Overview of TEX Live4 2.1 The TEX Collection: TEX Live, proTEXt, MacTEX.....................4 2.2 Top level TEX Live directories.................................4 2.3 Overview of the predefined texmf trees............................5 2.4 Extensions to TEX.......................................6 2.5 Other notable programs in TEX Live.............................6 2.6 Fonts in TEX Live.......................................7 3 Installation 7 3.1 Starting the installer......................................7 3.1.1 Unix...........................................7 3.1.2 MacOSX........................................8 3.1.3 Windows........................................8 3.1.4 Cygwin.........................................9 3.1.5 The text installer....................................9 3.1.6 The expert graphical installer.............................9 3.1.7 The simple wizard installer.............................. 10 3.2 Running the installer...................................... 10 3.2.1 Binary systems menu (Unix only).......................... 10 3.2.2 Selecting what is to be installed...........................
    [Show full text]
  • Minimal Steps to Typeset Vietnamese
    Minimal steps to typeset Vietnamese Hàn Thế Thành 14th May 2013 This document tries to answer the question that has been often asked: How can I typeset just a few Vietnamese words in my document, which is in English (or French/German/...)? The answer depends very much on a particular scenario, however I assume that you are in a hurry, you don’t want to bother with issues like how to display and write Vietnamese in your TEX editor. You only have a few Vietnamese words in your LATEX file and you would like to see them properly displayed in your final PDF or PS file. 1. As the very first requirement, you must have some minimal LATEX support for Vietnamese: • Check whether you have VnTEX installed. VnTEX is included in teTEX, MikTEX and TEXLive. • If the above is not the case, try to download and install VnTEX by following the instructions at http://vntex.sf.net/download/vntex. • If you can’t install VnTEX, you must have at least Latin Modern fonts installed. Then download http://vntex.sf.net/download/vntex-support/t5enc.def and put it to the directory where your LATEX file is. • If all the above fails, try to get help from someone else to solve at least one of those issues. 2. Make sure you have package fontenc loaded with T5 encoding. For example, if your document contains European languague(s) only, then you should have a line saying \usepackage[T1,T5]{fontenc} in your preamble. 3. An example how to input Vietnamese words may look like this: {\fontencoding{T5}\selectfont Ti\'\ecircumflex{}ng Vi\d\ecircumflex{}t} which gives the output as Ti¸ng Vi»t.
    [Show full text]
  • A Directory Structure for TEX Files TUG Working Group on a TEX Directory Structure (TWG-TDS) Version 1.1 June 23, 2004
    A Directory Structure for TEX Files TUG Working Group on a TEX Directory Structure (TWG-TDS) version 1.1 June 23, 2004 Copyright c 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003, 2004 TEX Users Group. Permission to use, copy, and distribute this document without modification for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that this notice appears in all copies. It is provided “as is” without expressed or implied warranty. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this document under the condi- tions for verbatim copying, provided that the modifications are clearly marked and the document is not represented as the official one. This document is available on any CTAN host (see Appendix D). Please send questions or suggestions by email to [email protected]. We welcome all comments. This is version 1.1. Contents 1 Introduction 2 1.1 History . 2 1.2 The role of the TDS ................................... 2 1.3 Conventions . 3 2 General 3 2.1 Subdirectory searching . 3 2.2 Rooting the tree . 4 2.3 Local additions . 4 2.4 Duplicate filenames . 5 3 Top-level directories 5 3.1 Macros . 6 3.2 Fonts............................................ 8 3.3 Non-font METAFONT files................................ 10 3.4 METAPOST ........................................ 10 3.5 BIBTEX .......................................... 11 3.6 Scripts . 11 3.7 Documentation . 12 4 Summary 13 4.1 Documentation tree summary . 14 A Unspecified pieces 15 A.1 Portable filenames . 15 B Implementation issues 16 B.1 Adoption of the TDS ................................... 16 B.2 More on subdirectory searching . 17 B.3 Example implementation-specific trees .
    [Show full text]
  • BROWSIX: Bridging the Gap Between Unix and the Browser Bobby Powers, John Vilk, Emery D
    BROWSIX: Bridging the Gap Between Unix and the Browser Bobby Powers, John Vilk, Emery D. Berger University of Massachusetts Amherst Abstract As a representative example, websites like ShareLaTeX1 2 A Applications written to run on conventional operating sys- and Overleaf let users write and edit LTEX documents in the tems typically depend on OS abstractions like processes, pipes, browser without the need to install a TEX distribution locally. signals, sockets, and a shared file system. Porting these ap- This workflow lowers the barrier for students and first-time A plications to the web currently requires extensive rewriting LTEX authors and enables real-time collaboration, eliminating or hosting significant portions of code server-side because some of the complexity of creating multi-author documents. browsers present a nontraditional runtime environment that These applications achieve this functionality by providing a lacks OS functionality. browser-based frontend for editing; user input is sent to the server for persistence and collaboration purposes. When the This paper presents BROWSIX, a framework that bridges pdflatex the considerable gap between conventional operating systems user requests a generated PDF, the website runs bibtex and the browser, enabling unmodified programs expecting a and server-side on the user’s behalf, with the resulting PDF sent to the browser when complete. Unix-like environment to run directly in the browser. BROWSIX comprises two core parts: (1) a JavaScript-only system that These web applications generate PDFs server-side out of makes core Unix features (including pipes, concurrent pro- necessity because browsers lack the operating system services cesses, signals, sockets, and a shared file system) available to and execution environment that Unix programs expect.
    [Show full text]