[tex-live] Installation: dviout\dviout.exe not found

[T T]

2009/2/25 Staszek Wawrykiewicz <staw at gust.org.pl>:
> On Tue, 24 Feb 2009, Wolfgang Fleischer wrote:
>
>> TeX Live 2008 clearly breaks with Winedt and TeXnicCenter at least with
>> respect to dviout and PS_View:
>>
>> *Winedt can no longer detect TL as the Registry-Key advertising TL to
>> the system is no longer there.
>> *If a user accepts the default install dir (c:\texlive\2008) Winedt
>> again has no chance to find TL. The problem is the extra directory level
>> '2008'
>> *In ../bin/win32 we can find every kind of 'executables', i.e.
>> context.cmd, psv.bat, dviout.vbs. Nothing of it is suitable for
>> GUI-Programs expecting *.exe files to execute.
>> So for now users willing to use Winedt or TeXnicCenter has to do a lot
>> of extra manual configuration.
>
> This is apparently the problem of the so-called tex-shells for Windows.
> And why not adding to that list eg. WinShell, LEd, not to mention emacs
> and gvim, etc.? Does WinEdt or TeXnicCenter (this one not maintained since
> 2004!) play any representative role as front-end for TeX? Why those tools
> are so hard to configure, or just oriented to some TeX distribution?
> I'll Cc also to the maintainers od WinEdt, LEd and Winshell
> to consider also the last point mentioned by Wolfgang (.bat, .cmd, .vbs).
>

Let me chime in here and set the record straight on a few things.
Batches and scripts (.bat, .cmd, .vbs) are by default executable on
Windows, or more precisely on the command prompt. Executable file
types are defined in PATHEXT environment variable. On my system it
gives:
.COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.MSC
The problem is most likely that those editors use CreateProcess API to
start programs, and that API does not search PATHEXT (nor PATH for
that matter). I suspect that using ShellExecute instead would work
around that, but I haven't checked that (and there might have some
other unwanted effects).

About TeXnicCenter. Please don't spread false information :-) Yes,
this project seemed to be dead for a long time, but it was revived
recently. There were two releases last year---beta and release
candidate 1---and ver. 2 is in the works. Please check it out at their
(recently redesigned) website:

http://www.texniccenter.org

Cheers,

Tomek