[OS X TeX] Tex on Windoze -- my summary

[Rene Borgella Jr.]

A report from TeX in Bill's World:

Thanks to the help and suggestions of you folks and Teoma and Google, 
I was able to find and install what I needed to make my work on a 
Dell Laptop more or less tolerable.  Actually, when I was TeXing, it 
wasn't so bad being in Windowsland; it was just when I was doing most 
other things that I thought that it was kinda sad that so many 
computer users choose to be in Windowsland.


As many of you suggested, MiKTex and WinEdt worked out fine. Being a 
relative novice at TeX (really not knowing much at all), I don't know 
how close to reality this is for the rest of you, but I found MiKTeX 
installation got me a working setup going in relatively short time. 
I did find, however, that, at least to the extent I was able to 
figure things out, installation is a more or less everything and the 
kitchen sink gets installed, and then you can remove some un-needed 
stuff (like languages you don't use) later.  Nothing as elegant and 
cool as i-Installer (Thanks Gerben!) Again, perhaps there are 
installation methods that allow more control, but I didn't see 
anything like that right away.

The editor to use was a tougher call for me.  I found that of the 
ones I tried, I liked WinEdt and TeXnicCenter the best.  I think they 
both have a lot going for them, but there were frustrating things for 
me about each of them.  In the end, I choose WinEdt but always found 
things in it that I was not happy about.  Mostly, this had to do with 
my feeling that settings and prefs should have been easier to find 
and tweak.  To me it seemed that these settings were sometimes 
unnecessarily complex and all too often there were several ways to do 
things that weren't adequately explained.  My biggest frustration is 
with the "Help" system.  If you have help on, you cannot actually 
access the program's settings while reading the help.  Instead, you 
need to read about it, close the help, then do your tweaking. I think 
that TeXnicCenter was better than WinEdt for this stuff, and am 
seriously considering going over to that program for a while to see 
how it works for me.   What I really did like about WinEdt was its 
reader: YAP.  I am trying to get YAP to work with TeXnicCenter; if I 
can do that, then I'll really give TeXnic a good workout and testing. 
I 'll let you all know more about TeXnicCenter when I use it.

Again, thanks to all for your help on using TeX in Windows.

Rene
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