[tex-live] Perl for Windows

[gnwiii at gmail.com]

On 6/21/06, Fabrice Popineau <Fabrice.Popineau at supelec.fr> wrote:
> * Hans Hagen <pragma at wxs.nl> writes:
>     > (to be honnest, i think that the tex community is not (or no
>     > longer) capable of thinking cross platform)
>
> Not the TeX community, but this TeX(Live) community.
>
> Anyway,  the Windows slot  is perfectly filled   by MiKTeX and there are
> certainly much more MiKTeX users (undeclared  to TUG or other LUGs) than
> teTeX/TeXLive/whatever web2c based users. (It would be interesting to try
> to call for a poll BTW).

Many linux users need tetex only to format documentation when building packages.

In my experience, among LaTeX users, MiKTeX is preferred by
users/groups that have no exposure to teTeX, while web2c distros are
preferred by people who move between Win32 and unix/linux (especially
where the texmf tree is on a network share).

I recently helped a colleague convert a book originally prepared using
Y&Y tex and author plain tex macros to pdftex.  Most of the work was
in converting fugures from
"EPS" to pdf.  Many of the figures had bounding boxes that cout off
parts of the figure, some weren't EPS at all.  I ended up using
several different systems due to problems with the utilities (outdated
version of epstopdf not handling Mac newlines, ghostscript barfing on
certain figures, etc.).   We expect any distro to handle simple tasks,
so the differences that matter are in the details.

Total numbers aren't that useful when the community is fragmented.
It would be better to ask if there are significant numbers of Win32
users for whom MikTeX isn't suitable.  Certainly I have read of
problems with context in the past.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia