Re: Perl scripts almost unusable under Win32 MiKTeX

["George N. White III" <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>]

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:

> Recent ConTeXt updates have rendered some Perl scripts
> (texshow.pl & modules) unusable under MiKTeX because they
> heavily rely on web2c methods to find binaries and
> complementary files.

And probably under fptex (e.g., TeX Live 2003) if you have spaces in paths
(I tried to eliminate spaces in paths when I ran into problems, so I don't
know if the subsequent changes have fixed this).

Fptex caches the kpathsea lists in shared memory, which is a big
performance boost for slower machines on fat32 (but also comes with some
caveates -- RTFM).  The recent (Dec. 18th??) updates to fptex seem at long
last to work properly on Win9x, Win2k, and WinXP.  The TeX Live 2003 page
has a link to the fptex update page, but the URL for the updates seems to
have died with the recent prohibition against symbolic links, so you will
want to edit the properties for Maintenance/Add packages to change the
command line to use you favorite CTAN mirror, e.g.,:

C:\texLive\bin\Win32\TeXSetup.exe --add-package --remote-source-directory
ftp://ctan.cms.math.ca/tex-archive/systems/win32/fptex/0.7/.

--
George N. White III  <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>
  Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada