[texworks] Project Management type stuff

[Paul A Norman]

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
>
>