[OS X TeX] OT: TeX on windows

[ADITYA D TRIVEDI]

>Stephan Hochhaus <stephan at yauh.de>

<snip>

>I installed MikTeX on the XP machines in the 
>computer room and it was ok but somewhat irritating. >You have to use a 
>setup wizard that is used to either download or >install the software, 
>there seems to be no way to download and install in one step. So I 
>downloaded all TeX software in step 1, ended the application and 
>re-opened it for step 2, installing MikTeX (which is straight forward, 
>by the way.

True. That can get annoying. However, if you dont need the large or total installation, you can download the small-miktex-2.4.1705.exe and you can install it in one step. For an intro class, this may be sufficient.

>Additionally I installed Ghostscript and as >TeXnicCenter as the editor. 

You do not need to install ghostscript separately anymore. MiKTeX distribution comes with GhostScript. It tends to have the latest GPL version of Ghostscript.

>While all things worked great, TeXnicCenter is not at all 
>recommendable. Telling my students about how stable LaTeX is and having 
>TeXnicCenter giving me errors every once in a while that it cannot open 
>the current document within Acrobat for this or that reason (only 
>solution is to quit the application completely and then re-open it) did 
>not exactly back up my line of argumentation.

I use TeXnicCenter (and WinEdt) on windows and dont have such problems. Did you install the latest version of TeXnicCenter (6.21 i think)? Also, what version of Acrobat (Reader I presume) do you have installed? I have Acrobat Reader 6 and havent had any issue.

Also, I would like to recommend showing students how to typeset to DVI output. Inverse seacrh is a great time saving feature when creating a document. The final run can be to create pdf. Of course, then you have to worry about YAP not showing rotated images properly, eps vs png, jpg, pdf figures, etc.

Overall, using LaTeX on Windows (MiKTeX + TeXnicCenter or MiKTeX + WinEdt) has been an enjoyable experience for me. I prefer using a Mac because, I like the way a Mac works, ceating pdf images is easy, things like epstopdf work seamlessly, etc. But, those issues rarely come up in a intro class.

-Eddy

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