[tex-live] solution for texlive 2008 portable for windows xp

[T T]

2009/5/28 Germain BOYER <germain.boyer at ac-toulouse.fr>:
> After several attempts and a lot of research on the Internet I eventually managed to have texlive 2008 portable work.
> Here's how I did it so that you can benefit from it. It will avoid a lot of trouble to many of you!
> I call E: the external hard drive or the USB disk and F: the DVD player.

Thanks Germain for your input. Why didn't you ask on this list first?
It would save you a lot of that research.

Anyway, you will be happy to know that for the next release we plan to
provide better support for portable operation including package
manager (currently there might be some traces left behind on the host
computer, so it is not fully portable).

> I know of two portable editors: texmaker and winshell. I prefer texmaker. There must be others around that are good too!

TL 2009 will come with TeXworks editor preconfigured and ready to use
(batteries fully included this time :). BTW, WinShell requires
'Settings' directory to be present alongside winshell.exe for fully
portable use (otherwise it will write its settings to
%APPDATA%\WinShell on the host computer).

> start "" "E:\Texmaker\texmaker.exe"

Drive letters can change. It's better to use something like this:

    start "" "%~dp0Texmaker\texmaker.exe"

The part %~dp0 resolves to the directory with the batch script itself
(tl-portable-texmaker.bat in this case).

> If ghostscript is installed on C: then the texmaker default command ps2pdf won't work. I have replaced it by this command:

This is odd, it should not happen in the setup you described. Can you
provide more details? Does it work from the command line? How was this
configured in texmaker?

Cheers,

Tomek