Re: [AUCTeX] Install report: Emacs and Windows 98

[Harald von Aschen]

At 14:48 22.07.05 +0200, Ralf Angeli wrote:
> * Harald von Aschen (2005-07-22) writes:

Hi Ralf,

> > And now the installation:
> > After the first errors, reading INSTALL.windows I have the same 
> problems as
> > Michael Forster. I can highly recommend his article
> >     http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/auctex/2005-05/msg00070.html
> > and the steps he has done here are the same I have to do. Thank you, 
> Michael!
>
> What do you mean with "the same problems"?  He did a CVS checkout and
> you downloaded a snapshot.

Sorry for any inconvenience. I really should have been more exact.

I have also to start with point 6) of his message. Together

GS="F:/Programme/gs/gs8.13/bin/gswin32c.exe" \
  ./configure --prefix= \
  F:/Programme/emacs-21.3-fullbin-i386.tar/emacs-21.3 \
  --with-texmf-dir=f:/Programme/TeXLive/texmf

Michael has put "gswin32.exe" without the "c" but this was mentioned in my 
INSTALL.windows (gswin32c.exe is a WIN32 command line version of 
Ghostscript) and descibed in preview-latex.pdf. (Although trying to use 
preview-latex with my Emacs version is somehow useless, I know. But here we 
are talking about the installation process.)

To deal with spaces is not very good so I have decided to do all 
installations in directories without spaces. And again using "~" was not 
working in the environmental variable GS.

> Based on this information we might be able to improve the installation
> instructions.  I am currently thinking of adding an "In a Nutshell"
> section at the start of the installation instructions for Windows.
> This should merely include a set of instructions working for 90% of
> Windows systems and spare most people a lot of reading.  I just have
> to figure out a best-practice layout for the installation.  For
> example, `prefix' is not well defined on Windows.  A feasible option
> could be to abuse the Emacs directory for this like some people do.

Hm, what do you mean by "prefix" is not well defined and to abuse the Emacs 
directory? Do you mean the difference between personal home directory under 
Unix et. al. and program path under Windows? The only thing I do not have 
understand fully is the difference between prefix and with-(x)emacs under 
windows. As in install.windows:
   `--with-emacs'
          if you are installing for a version of Emacs.  You can use
          `--with-emacs=DRIVE:/PATH/TO/EMACS' to specify the name of the
          installed Emacs executable, complete with its path if
          necessary (if Emacs is not within a directory specified in
          your `PATH' environment setting).

And Emacs is not in my search path although ./configure has done it's work 
only with setting prefix.

Again as Michael I have to do the TeX calls by hand before my make goes 
through without an error. I suppose it is the "~" in the filename. Here a 
snip of my autoexec.bat inserted by TeXLive during installation
  set PATH=F:\PROGRA~1\TEXLIVE\BIN\WIN32;%PATH%

Another hint which might be important for Windows 98 user is the length of 
the path variable. As far as I can see is the space for an individual 
environmental variable under Windows XP is 8192 bytes as given here
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/ntcmds_shelloverview.mspx
but under Windows 98 it is not so easy so it has taken me a while to find this
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;230205
to increase it if it is necessary (as e.g. here for me). Otherwise my path 
variable was cut off.

> > But the "View" command was still not working. I'm using TeXLive and I do
> > not have xdvi and xpdf. Instead of this I'm using windvi for dvi files and
> > start to open extensions with the associated program in Windows.
> >
> > So - and I suppose this is not the suggested way - I have changed the file
> > /site-lisp/auctex/tex.el and there I have replaced every occurence of xdvi
> > with windvi and xpdf with start. After that all is working fine.
>
> Current snapshots (yours is too old) will install a file called
> tex-fptex.el.  You can load this with
> (require 'tex-fptex)
> in the .emacs file and should get better defaults with respect to your
> TeX system.

Thank you very much! Yes, you are right, tex-fptex.el is not included in my 
snapshot.

Best regards

Harald