[OS X TeX] tetex (i-installer) on windows ?

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 17.11.2004 um 12:10 schrieb Steffen Wolfrum:

> Is there a chance that I can transfer the whole tetex-folder (as given 
> by i-installer) and just make little corrections (paths etc.)? Has 
> anybody already done that successfully?

It's not complicated to transfer the contents of the i-Packages 
somewhere else. Once you have installed an i-Package on your Mac it has 
become 'fat', i.e. some archive files where fetched and added to the 
former 'thin' i-Package description.

On the Mac you can press the Ctrl key while clicking an application or 
an i-Package. The context menu that opens now has at least one extra 
item: "Show package contents." This will show you the archive files 
*.tar.bz. On the command line you could start to type 'tar -jvtf ' and 
then drag such an archive on the Terminal. Press return, go fetch some 
coffee or tea and then scroll back and wonder! You'll see the contents 
of the archives. Each member starts with a relative path, './' or just 
with 'tex/', 'doc/' etc. So to extract the contents you need to change 
directory into which the contents should be extracted.

It's not always obvious where an archive belongs! To copy things to a 
PC you should enable locate. Or run manually 'sudo 
/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb'. After some time an index of the useful 
files and directories of your Mac is made (and all CDs, DVDs, external 
disks etc. -- so remove what you do not need). Then you can invoke 
'locate tex/xmltex/base/xmltex.tex' to see into which branch branch 
this archive belongs to (the file is a member of this archive).

Other way round: you have your log file and see what's missing on your 
PC. Then it might be good use to prepare some files containing the 
contents of the archives. This is easily achieved! You remember the 
'tar -jvtf'? All you need to is to add '... > tex.33-Contents'. tex.33 
means you were listing that component of the tex i-Package, needs some 
extra typing, you understand. Now seeing what your missing you can 
invoke 'grep unicode.sty tex*Contents'. The output could be:

/Users/Steffen/tex.11-Contents:-r--r--r-- root/admin    23178 
2003-02-08 23:32:10 tex/xmltex/passivetex/unicode.sty

So you see it's from the tex archive no. 11 in the tex i-Package. 
Applying locate you'll see it belongs into the texmf.local tree.

The best way would be if you you export/share the PC's file system and 
mount it on your mac. To extract exactly this file you can proceed:

cd /Volume/WindowsXP/.../texmf.local
tar jxvf /on/your/mac/path/to/fatted/i-Packages/tex.ii2/tex.11.tar.bz2 
tex/xmltex/passivetex/unicode.sty

And you can happily work after on your PC.

The path to tex.11.tar.bz2 can be found by invoking 'locate tex.11'. 
The argument for tar to extract is important: it must be exactly the 
string that grep found in the Contents file. If this name starts with 
'./' these two characters have to be part of the argument. If you want 
to extract the whole archive:

cd /Volume/WindowsXP/.../texmf.local
tar jxf /on/your/mac/path/to/fattend/i-Packages/tex.ii2/tex.11.tar.bz2

Can take some more time, can overwrite. Did you notice that I omitted 
'v'? This switch stands for the verbosity of tar's output. With 'v' it 
lists every member, which is a nice feature when you extract a few 
files from a large archive. When all the members you need were reported 
you can finish tar with Ctrl-C. When you're extracting the whole 
contents of an archive it's best not see every member listed ...

Well, that's the UNIX way of doing it. Have you thought of MikTeX? And 
the dante CD/DVD set? Two great sources.
--
Greetings

   Pete

These are my principles and if you don't like them... well, I have 
others. - Groucho Marx

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