Re: cygwin/tetex or miktex?

[Mari Voipio <mari.voipio@iki.fi>]

On 8 Oct 2004, rb wrote:
> Is one of these two preferable when running ConTeXt on windows?

If you ask me (Windows NT/2000/XP), none of them... When I started to
learn ConTeXt, I installed miktex, but I didn't like it. Then I tried
TeXLive model 2002 and while it had couple of font installation problems,
once I got it to work, it worked fine.

Since this spring I'm using TeXLive 2003 and once I got to as far as
burning the CD (downloading problems + stupid Windows XP doesn't have
built-in tools for opening .bz2 archives or burning .iso CD:s!) and found
the magic line to be added to my old ConTeXt docs to make fonts work (the
one about \usetypescript[adobekb][\defaultencoding]), I haven't had any
problems whatsoever (or, let's say: all problems have been caused by my
code, haven't found bugs in the TeXLive installation).

I use NT Emacs+context.el as my editor (XEmacs would come on the TeXLive
CD, but I didn't want to switch) as I'm used to GNU Emacs from before.
However, even WordPad or Notepad will do, they just don't have the
highlighting etc.
SciTe is an editor for Windows, but even with Pragma's manual (at
<http://www.pragma-ade.com/show-man.pdf>, fifth from top, fifth from
left), installation was kind of tricky, not as easy as we Windows users
are used to. On the other hand, once SciTe is installed and some commands
(like 'what "build" means') have been explained to the clueless
Windows+Word user, they seem to find Scite easy to master (ok, test group
is really small, but you get the idea - it is a challenge to introduce
something like ConTeXt into a standard office environment).
There are other suitable editors out there, too, but I haven't tested
them.

However, if you are *only* using ConTeXt, I'd recommend downloading
http://www.pragma-ade.com/context/install/mswintex.zip.bz2 (minimal
CONTEXT distribution (windows)) from Pragma's website. Or, if you want
something portable, grab
<http://www.pragma-ade.com/context/install/tex.iso.bz2> (stand-alone
CONTEXT environment (iso image)), unzip, burn onto cd, insert cd into any
Windows PC and use!
(Disclaimer: I haven't tested the minimal version yet, will need to hog
somebody elses NT for test purposes; my stand-alone version is from August
and works fine with a multiple file environment. That ConTeXt CD includes
a pre-configured editor, I don't know about the current stand-alone
version)

If your Windows doesn't recognize the bz2 archives, for example the free
unzipper PowerArchiver will open it (there's also a handy command line
bz2-unzipper, google for it, I don't remember the name); I think cygwin
had it... And all reasonable CD burning programs (like Nero) burn .iso
images, it's just XP's built-in burner that's too dumb for it (been there,
tried that, cursed it....).


Hmm... Maybe I should *finally* get around to continuing on my
context4windows.html.... (and probably context4windowsusers.html as
well and windowseditors4context.html and....)


Greetings from sub-zero temperatures,
				Mari
				windows user, windows teacher
				(but unix mail!)