[OS X TeX] A Wintel mate to TeXShop

[Aditya Dushyant Trivedi]

>From: Alain Schremmer <Schremmer.Alain at verizon.net>

>My schedule this semester means that I will have to spend some time in 
>my office at school. So, I thought that I would use these hours on my 
>magnum opus. But of course, all I have there is a wintel box. So, here 
>is my question: what should I install/do there so that I can work on 
>said magnum opus both home and in the office. Is there any kind of 
>problem that I should expect or am I just my usual paranoid self and I 
>should just download MikTeX and all shall be well in the best of all 
>possible worlds?

Wokring with TeX/LaTeX on Windows is smooth as well. It is however different than working on Mac. Some things to note:

1) A free alternative of MiKTeX + TeXniCenter should be fine. Install MiKTeX first. TeXnicCenter will detect it automatically and create the necessart settings.

2) Syncing on Windows is for LaTeX + DVI instead of LaTeX + PDF. You might prefer using .dvi output while creating documents since you can go back and forth between output and your latex file.

3) Your preamble contains \usepackage{pdfsync}. This for obvious reasons not for Windows. You have two options: 
    i) Comment it out when working on windows. 
   ii) Create an empty package called pdfsync on windows so that LaTeX does not complain and you dont forget uncommenting it when copying it over on Mac.

4) If you have any personally created packages, bib files, they go in different places on Windows. Instead of ~/texmf/..., you need to place them under 
C:\localtexmf\tex\latex\ and its subfolders for LaTeX stuff
C:\localtexmf\bibtex\ and its subfolders for BibTeX stuff

Here's the kicker. If you do these you will need to refresh the MiKTeX database (under MiKTeX options) for it to find these files. This is of course if you need to keep just one copy in a central repository. If its just for one document, you can keep them in the same folder as your LaTeX file.

5) The pdftex distributed under gwTeX and MiKTeX are not in sync. At times you will be running your files through different versions. I dont think that should be a problem since it is very stable. Just to note in case you find that the output looks a bit different on the two OSes. Same goes for different packages. At times the distribution may have different versions of different packages.

6) Set your text encoding to Windows Latin or ISO Latin 1 instead of Mac Roman.

Eddy

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