[texworks] relative binary paths & local/global settings

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 16:05, T T wrote:
> 2009/6/22 Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com>:
>> On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 22:02, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> 1.) Is there any way to configure "binaryPaths=" relative to location
>>> of texworks? Something similar to $selfautoloc in web2c dialect ...
>>> The nice thing about it is that one would be able to double-click on
>>> texworks application without configuring anything and get all the
>>> paths properly set alredy (for some specific tex distibution that can
>>> be moved around on drive, but has tex binaries on well defined
>>> location relative to texworks).
>>
>> I take half of my question back. After removing "binaryPaths=" (with
>> some meaningless setting) from texworks.ini, the location of
>> texworks.exe is already in binary path (which is exactly what I wanted
>> to achieve).
>>
>> If binaryPaths is already present in texworks.ini then defaultbinpaths
>> in texwork-setup.ini made no difference and that was puzzling me a bit
>> (visually the path was empty when I cheched in the program, but in
>> reality there was binaryPaths=@invalid sitting in texworks.ini).
>
> That's apparently how Qt represents an empty list, with '@invalid'
> value, see http://tug.org/pipermail/texworks/2009q2/000779.html
>
> As for putting TeXworks together with other binaries, we rejected that
> option for TeX Live. Apart from cluttering the bin dir there is also a
> risk of dll conflicts if TeXworks is on the path because Windows uses
> the same path for searching executables and dlls. For that reason we
> will use a .bat wrapper in bin/win32.
>
> This has an additional advantage that instead of using
> texworks-setup.ini we can use environment variables TW_INIPATH &
> TW_LIBPATH and specify the location of settings at run-time after
> consulting kpsewhich. I don't know if that matters to you.

We are trying to pack TW for ConTeXt distribution (it already works
nicely with some details that could be improved). So any good ideas
how to do it better than using the same path are welcome (bat wrapper
sounds nice as well, but I need to figure out how to configure path to
TeX binaries without having them explicitely in PATH - by specifying
just a relative position to TW).

How exactly do you initialize TW? Does it respect TW_INIPATH variable
from texmf.cnf out of the box?

Mojca