Re: Re[4]: New Beta

[David Arnold <darnold@northcoast.com>]

Giuseppe,

At 11:09 AM 8/25/01 +0200, you wrote:
>David,
>
>Friday, August 24, 2001 you wrote:
>
>DA> 5. Run texexec --make to build the formats. Because the TeXFormatPath is
>DA> set in texexec.ini, the formats are created AND moved into the correct
>DA> place in my /localtexmf/miktex/fmt.
>
>I move the formats by hand. This is basically the difference, I
>believe. 

I could move the formats by hand. At the moment, the Miktex Options, Tex
Formats tab has no options for metafun and mptopdf formats. These can be
place in there I am sure, but I've always liked the power of texexec.pl. 

However, we probably should be thinking of the users that are new to
Context and Miktex and making the transition away from word processors such
as Word as painless as possible. And, right now, the Context installation
is not error free in the Miktex distribution.

>Anyway, you could probably report the "limited-length
>cmdline" to Christian Schenk ... provided that it's a MiKTeX
>limitation and not an operating system limitation as I suspect.

I have. I am waiting to see what information he has for us.

>DA> 7. Then I run
>
>DA> texexec --make --alone --format=mptopdf
>
>DA> This places mptopdf.efmt in /locatexmf/miktex/fmt. Then I take
runperl.exe
>DA> and rename it to mptopdf.exe. These all used to be in
>DA> \miktex\context\perltk, but Christian has moved texexec.exe into the
>DA> \miktex\miktex\bin directory, which is on the path created when Miktex is
>DA> installed.
>
>Small question: where does the texexec.exe provided in the latest
>MiKTeX look for the Perl things?
>
>DA>  This is a cool piece of software which allows me to type
>
>DA> mptopdf filename.1
>
>DA> where filename.1 is Metapost output. The result is the file
filename-1.pdf.
>DA> Nice, huh? The command also accepts wildcards, as in
>
>DA> mptopdf filename.? or mptopdf filename.*
>
>DA> Old habits die hard, so I'm not quite sure how I want to setup my new
>DA> Miktex, but I am learning.
>
>I wonder: doesn't the MiKTeX-prodived epstopdf do the same?

Probably. I haven't used it as yet, probably because I have been an Acrobat
user for several years, which I use to convert my Matlab eps files to pdf
for inclusion in pdftex docs. There is a small explanation of mptopdf here:

http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/sources/mptopdf.pdf

A similar explanation exits on page 426 of:

http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/beta/metafun-s.pdf