Re: PDFTeX sources

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 20:44:37 -0700
Salman Khilji <skhilji@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:

> 1)  I want to know the simplest way (and the minimal way) to compile PDFTeX on 
> Windows.  From the manual, I see that you have to download
> 
> I want to be able to compile pdfTeX from sources using an already available 
> DSP (MS Visual C++ project file)---this means it should somehow use an 
> already existing config.h file.
> 
> I downloaded the MikTeX sources, but it comes with 65535 other files and 
> directories that I do not need and also mandates the download of Cygwin.

I don't think there is an 'easy and minimal way' atm, especially not for pdftex 
which needs a number of libraries available at compile time. 
 
> 2)  Basically, I want to learn a little about the internals of pdfTeX to 
> investigate if I can take the PDF specific C source code out of it and 

Isolation would be very hard I believe. pdftex makes changes all over (e.g. to 
allow justification improvements and creation of arbitrary pdf objects).

> somehow use then in the TeX++ project (which is a reincarnation of CommonTeX, 
> which was an implementation of TeX written in C from scratch by Pat Monardo).  

Tell me more (off-list), it seems we are doing more or less the same thing!  

You might want to look at the sources on this location: 

  http://www.metatex.org/

The CXTeX sources are not bug-free, but it compiles usable pdf documents cf. 
"pdfetex". They are based on a manual conversion (by me) of the web sources.
It is a lot easier to setup than a full blown TeX installation, but it does 
use autoconf, so it will need some work to get it compile without msys/cygwin.

Greetings, Taco