[tex-live] [Fwd: Re: TeXLive Perl + latexmk (windows)]

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Hi Ulrike,

Ulrike Fischer a écrit :
> I have never used TeXLive but I'm sure there is nothing fundamentely
> wrong with the windows version.

I'm glad you think so :-)

> 1. The installation descriptions at
> (http://www.tug.org/texlive/acquire-netinstall.html) starts with
> "After unpacking the archive, move to the resulting install-tl-*
> subdirectory". This is simply not the windows wording. 
> 
Sure, but this page is not specific to windows. Also, see below.

> 2. The description in the main documentation is a bit better as it
> contains the word "double-click":
> "If you are using the net installer, or the DVD installer failed to
> start automatically, double-click install-tl.bat"
> But the naming of the install script is wrong. It should be
> setup-texlive.exe or something like this. 
> 
In the future, we might offer a windows-specific installer in the form of a
self-extracting executable (since objectively, the zip/move to dir/run a bat
file way isn't familiar to most users). I have no objection to call it
setup-texlive.exe if it can make windows user happier :-)

> 3. The package manager in miktex is mpm.exe, and the configuration
> tool is mo.exe. The main tool in TeX Live is tlmgr. Now look at this
> two captions from the miktex and the tex live documentation:
> 
> Figure 4.1. MiKTeX Options: General Settings
> Figure 9: tlmgr in GUI mode. 
> 
> A windows documentation avoids to confront a user with "technical"
> looking names like tlmgr.

I must admit that such names without vowels are rather Unixish (the mostly
recall of the C library or POSIX function names, which is probably not the
definition of windows-user-friendly).

It costs essentially nothing to change the windows title to something like "TeX
Live manager" which is the full name of tlmgr anyway, and again, if you think it
makes users happier...

> 4. Later on in the documenation there are some screenshots of the
> gui of tlmgr and while there look quite neat, there certainly don't
> look like normal windows dialogs. 
> 
Well, as a matter of personal taste, I don't like the Tk look on X11, I find it
less bad on windows, but yeah, it doesn't feel really native. I'm under the
impression that Wxwidgets and Qt look more native, or at least more mainstream,
but changing the toolkit essentially means rewriting the interface (and other
changes), so I don't see it happening, sorry.

Anyway, thanks for your remarks.

Manuel.