[tex-live] solution for texlive 2008 portable for windows xp

Germain BOYER germain.boyer at ac-toulouse.fr
Thu May 28 14:31:31 CEST 2009


Bonjour tex-live, 

Hello, 
After several attempts and a lot of research on the Internet I eventually managed to have texlive 2008 portable work. 
Here's how I did it so that you can benefit from it. It will avoid a lot of trouble to many of you! 
I call E: the external hard drive or the USB disk and F: the DVD player. 


Download texlive20008.iso 
Rip the image onto a DVD or extract the image to your hard drive with winrar. 
Install Tex live on your hard drive. 
Copy the file named C:\texlive on your USB disk. 
In your DVD go to F:\texlive2008\tlpkg copy the files installer and tlperl and paste them in E:\texlive\2008\tlpkg 
In your DVD go to F:\texlive2008 copy the files tl-portable.bat and install-tl and paste them in E:\texlive\2008 
Run tl-portable.bat 


You should now be able to use Tex Live 2008 in command line. 
I know of two portable editors: texmaker and winshell. I prefer texmaker. There must be others around that are good too! 


Here are the steps to follow to use your favourite portable editor with texlive2008. 


Copy the file tl-portable.bat 
Rename that copy into tl-portable-texmaker.bat for example. 
Unzip texmaker.zip in E:\texmaker 
Edit the file tl-portable-texmaker.bat 


You can either suppress the last two lines or write REM followed by a space at the start of those two lines so that they don't get interpreted. 


REM %COMPSPEC% /k 
REM exit 


Instead of those two lines or under them you write the following line: 


start "" "E:\Texmaker\texmaker.exe" 


Save the file tl-portable-texmaker.bat 
Run tl-portable-texmaker.bat 


Texmaker should now run and be properly configured to be used with Tex Live 2008. 


If ghostscript is installed on C: then the texmaker default command ps2pdf won't work. I have replaced it by this command: 
"C:\Program Files \gs\gs8.60\bin\gswin32c.exe" -dCompatibilityLevel=1.3 -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=%.pdf %.ps 


I found that command in the configuration of MeWa (former latexeditor) which I think is really good but is not portable. 


So I have three files: DVI PS and PDF. 


I hope I'm clear enough and that I didn't make any mistakes in telling you about this procedure. 
Just to check that this procedure is valid, go through the different steps and correct the errors if there are any. 


Sincerely, 

Germain BOYER, germain.boyer at ac-toulouse.fr 28-05-2009 


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