[tex-live] [Fwd: Re: TeXLive Perl + latexmk (windows)]

Ulrike Fischer news3 at nililand.de
Wed Apr 14 16:30:54 CEST 2010


Am Wed, 14 Apr 2010 03:43:10 +0200 schrieb Reinhard Kotucha:

>  > There are no substantial problems with Windows, only wrong
>  > expectations. If you expect Windows to behave like Linux, you're
>  > going to be disappointed. MikTeX is popular because it feels like a
>  > native Windows application, while TeX Live still seems to be biased
>  > towards Linux.
> 
> Because TeX Live avoids the crappy Widows registry, or what?

I have never used TeXLive but I'm sure there is nothing fundamentely
wrong with the windows version. But nevertheless is doesn't feel
like a windows application. By simply looking at the documentation I
could find some examples:

E.g. 

1. The installation descriptions at
(http://www.tug.org/texlive/acquire-netinstall.html) starts with
"After unpacking the archive, move to the resulting install-tl-*
subdirectory". This is simply not the windows wording. 

2. The description in the main documentation is a bit better as it
contains the word "double-click":
"If you are using the net installer, or the DVD installer failed to
start automatically, double-click install-tl.bat"
But the naming of the install script is wrong. It should be
setup-texlive.exe or something like this. 

3. The package manager in miktex is mpm.exe, and the configuration
tool is mo.exe. The main tool in TeX Live is tlmgr. Now look at this
two captions from the miktex and the tex live documentation:

Figure 4.1. MiKTeX Options: General Settings
Figure 9: tlmgr in GUI mode. 

A windows documentation avoids to confront a user with "technical"
looking names like tlmgr. If you look at discussion of miktex users
you will seldom find one which use "mpm" or "mo". Everyone writes
"miktex options" or "miktex settings". 



4. Later on in the documenation there are some screenshots of the
gui of tlmgr and while there look quite neat, there certainly don't
look like normal windows dialogs. 


 
-- 
Ulrike Fischer 



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