[OS X TeX] migration from Fink to Gerben Wierda's TeX

[axretif at igo.com.mx]

> Dear all,
>
> Please forgive me asking a question that may sound a bit arrogant.
> Recently I migrated from a Linux box to Mac OS X and installed TeX
> along with a number of other necessary utilities using the Fink
> distribution.  Now that the dust has settled, I started to ask myself
> if this choice was optimal.
>
> Thus the question: what could be advantages (if any) of migrating to
> Gerben Wierda's TeX?

Many. It is really a much richer distribution, completely up-to-day, and
with a much better support in this list (N.B. I used the fink distribution
before gwTeX.)

>On the
> other hand, nobody wants to destabilize an already working setup.
> Could both TeXs live together on my Mac without conflicts for some
> transitional period?  Did anybody perform this kind of migration?

No, both can't co-exist. You have to un-install fink TeX and dependencies
before hand, then install gwTeX (TeX, Ghostscript, etc.). Take your time
to study everything in GW i-Directory --its worth your time. Only after
that, if you want some specific fink package (I use Kile, for example),
you can install fink's system-tetex.

One more thing, for you to ponder ---I have commented out fink's line:

. /sw/bin/init.sh

in my profile, and call fink apps from within X11 with, e.g,

source /sw/bin/init.sh ; kile

but that's just the way I prefer (of course you have to uncomment the line
before upgrading anything from fink).

> I think I am not prepared to change Emacs to TeXShop,

Enhanced Carbon Emacs is then what you want.


> What might have relevance otherwise is that I do a lot of
> TeX composing in Russian, and it is my impression that with Gerben
> Wierda's TeX I am going to benefit more from Mac OS X's native
> support of Russian/Cyrillic type, including fonts.

You are talking about XeTeX, which works with gwTeX out of the box.

Best

Axel


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