[texworks] Project Management type stuff

[Paul A Norman]

P.S. I am assuming here that ther is not warrant to place the packages
in question in a CTAN repository.

On 16 October 2010 09:50, Paul A Norman <paul.a.norman at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have recieved this from Peter Flynn on the Google Latex Users Group,
>
> On 16 October 2010 01:05, Peter Flynn <anglebracket at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Putting it more crudely, if you specify a relative, absolute, or partial
>> path in a \usepackage command, LaTeX will try to obey it, and won't use
>> texmf.cnf.
>
> Are there still OS specifc things wiht this as Bruno pointed out from
> his experience from previous years, or have recent LaTeX
> developments/fixes covered the path format issues?
>
> Peter Flynn continues ...
>> But this is really only for development or a last resort;
>> regularly-used packages should go in their proper tree (system, local,
>> version, global, user, etc) as defined in texmf.cnf, and be referenced by
>> their name alone.
>
> And I would generally agree with Peter about 'proper placement' of
> packages, but wonder in terms of helping new people onto LaTeX and
> what TeXworks can do to help and facilitate this, how we face the real
> world situations that Alain Schremmer writes about here, it seems that
> to some degree we are requiring people to become rocket scientists (no
> disrespect to our NASA colleagues) in order to produce a .pdf, they
> could have to learn a lot about their LaTeX distro management and
> tools first.
>
> This is a general question that will arrise as we want more perhaps
> less technically orientated people to have a wider access to LaTeX.
>
> Do we educate, or try and, at least initially, facilitate, first?
>
> Alain Schremmer wrote:
>> For the better or for the worse, the stuff has to work like an application.
>> Which means that it has to require zero LaTeX knowledge at least at the
>> level of the people most likely to use the stuff, namely two-year college
>> math instructors.
>
> Paul
>
> On 16 October 2010 02:21, Alain Schremmer <schremmer.alain at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Oct 14, 2010, at 11:15 PM, Paul A Norman wrote:
>>
>>> Your point about new users who are not going to (or want to even) play
>>> around with config files or working through thier TeX distro utilities
>>> is a fact of life I have come to accept, and would like to do what i
>>> can to help people who could otherwise well use LaTeX through tools
>>> like TeXworks, or perhaps they will pass LaTeX and family by.
>>>
>>> What I am exploring is whether this will always work on say Windows or
>>> any other OS, becasue it apparently depends on both OS and on the
>>> differing *TeX releases being used.
>>
>>
>> My particular problem is that the people who download the stuff from the
>> site, currently about a thousand a month, are probably not interested in the
>> least in writing but only in using the stuff. Hence ADM. But I have not
>> heard from anyone trying it with Linux. For that matter, I don't even know
>> how ADM works with Windows. Did you try it?
>>
>>>
>>> In Miktex I can set user directories that Miktex will look in for user
>>> written packages, and documentation for mthelp shell command to find.
>>> But that is not what I am wantng to do here.
>>>
>>> Bruno Voisin and Stefan's thoughts, and Peter Flynn (over on another
>>> list), suggest to me very strongly that we are not  going to find one
>>> shoe to fit all with this.
>>>
>>> So I am thinking that it may be possible to QtScript this in some way
>>> to detect the OS and distro found by Tw (held in preferences) and
>>> re-write relative file paths in the document preamble \usepackage{} as
>>> required for the current documents OS and TeX distro.
>>>
>>> We may need to enter them in a commented area and TwScript will
>>> rewrite them in appropriately?
>>>
>>> This may mean exposing those Tw distro info preferences for read only
>>> access to TwScripting?
>>>
>>> First I will need to research the thing thoroughly, if I can not find
>>> someone who has already.
>>>
>>> If sucessful, at worse this would only require encouraging
>>> collaberators, or letting people know who download your stuff Alain,
>>> that this will work if they use TeXworks, and may not always work
>>> otherwise depending on OS and LaTeX distro.
>>>
>>> I see that you are already needing to put notes in your download - has
>>> anyone tried it on a linux dsitro?
>>
>> For the better or for the worse, the stuff has to work like an application.
>> Which means that it has to require zero LaTeX knowledge at least at the
>> level of the people most likely to use the stuff, namely two-year college
>> math instructors.
>>
>> Regards,
>> --schremmer
>>
>>
>