TeX Live can be installed on systems running Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2K or XP. Older versions of Windows (3.1x) and MS-DOS are not supported.
It is necessary to have your Windows set up so that it uses the Microsoft Joliet extensions for reading CDs; simply look at the CD in Explorer and see whether it shows long, mixed-case, file names. If it does not, you must install the Joliet extensions.
The Windows TeX system included in TeX Live is no more and no less than the fpTeX distribution. It includes a dvi previewer, Windvi, which is similar in usage to the established Unix xdvi. The documentation can be found in texmf/doc/html/windvi/windvi.html.
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If your computer is configured to let the CD autostart, then a dialog box with a menu bar will popup on the screen, and you will have several choices from there:
If your CD does not autostart, you can explicitly run the program by double clicking on bin/win32/TeXLive.exe on the CD from the explorer window.
It is possible to use the TeX system directly from the demo CD or the live DVD, without installing the distribution to disk. (Thus the name ‘TeX Live’, in fact.) It is not possible to run TeX directly from the inst CD (see section 2.1 on p. 10).
To run live under Windows, from the menu, chose Explore CD-Rom, then Run TeX off CD-Rom. This will launch the XEmacs editor.
XEmacs startup file will set the environment variables needed. XEmacs will also setup a temporary TDS compliant texmf tree in the temporary area of your computer. It is needed to store files that may be built on the fly, such as pk bitmap fonts, or format files. Configuration files are copied from the CD to this texmf tree, so that you can edit them if needed. The ls-R database is computed for this texmf tree. The AUC-TeX mode will be entered Whenever you will visit or create a TeX file, providing all the bells and whistles for TeX support XEmacs is capable of.
If you run ’M-x shell’ within XEmacs, then you will have access to all the TeXLive tools from the command line provided by XEmacs.
[For advanced users:] You can also use the small batch file mkloctex.bat to be called in a directory bin\win32 of the CD. From the Start menu select ‘Run’, then browse the CD drive and select mkloctex.bat. Before starting it, you should add two parameters separated by a space: the letter of your CD drive and the letter of the drive where you want to install the TeX directory. The whole line should read, e.g., d:\bin\win32\mkloctex.bat d c. When installation is complete, please read carefully the information on screen. If you are running Windows 9x/ME, then you will have to restart Windows.
To be complete, a TeX Live installation needs support packages that are not commonly found on a Windows machine. Many scripts are written using the Perl language. Some important tools require the Ghostscript PostScript interpreter to render or to convert files. A graphic file toolbox is also needed in some cases. Last but not least, a TeX-oriented editor makes it easy to type in your TeX files.
All these tools are quite easy to find for Windows, but in order to try to make your life even easier, we have put such a set of tools on TeX Live:
These packages should be installed only all at once. The bundle is known as the XEmTeX bundle.
If you didn’t install XEmTeX, Perl and Ghostscript are installed anyway if they are not detected on your machine. This is because they are required by many important tools. The PERL5LIB and GS_LIB environment variables will be set too.
When you are under XEmacs, the tools provided shadow any other version you might have installed previously. The point here is that TeXSetup.exe will not install anything outside of the TeX Live location, neither will it run foreign installers, nor will it try to autodetect installed products using unreliable rules of thumb. The XEmTeX bundle is standalone and is meant to evolve in the future. The reference site is http://www.fptex.org/xemtex/.
If you don’t want to install this bundle, then you are on your own to install the required tools to complete your TeX Live system. Here is a list of places to get those tools:
You might want to install other tools that are not free1 and therefore not included on TeX Live, such as GSView, the Ghostscript companion to more conveniently view PS/PDF files. GSView is available from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/ or any CTAN site.
Warning: Win9x users must ensure they have enough environment space before undertaking installation. The TeXSetup.exe program won’t change the environment size for them. A few environment variables will be created and it is possible you run out of environment space. Add "SHELL=<path>COMMAND.COM /E:4096 /P" in the config.sys file in order to increase your environment size.
Installation is started by letting the media autostart. The program run is TeXSetup.exe if you are using the inst disk. If you are using the live or the demo disk, you will have to select the item TeXLive Software from the menu, then the subitem Install on Hard Disk. This will invoke TeXSetup.exe. You can also find it in the bin/win32 directory and run it, if the autostart fails for any reason. TeXSetup.exe is a Windows wizard and it will display several pages while running.
The TeXSetup Wizard Source directories for the TeX Live
files
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Why do we need both these directories? The files consisting of the TeX Live system are on the CD, of course, but some other useful packages are not, either because of space lacking or because their license was not compatible with TeX Live. You need to enable Internet downloading if you want to install these packages that are marked with a specific “remote” icon.
However, don’t panic: the default parameters of the setup will allow you to install a full system using the CD only. Simply, you won’t have WinEdt (for example), but you will be able to install it later.
So you can take your files from:
This option is available only if you enable Internet file downloading in the right part of the page. You also need to configure this Internet access by selecting to connect either using Internet Explorer 5 wininet.dll, or using a direct connection (ftp, http).
Root and directories Scheme
selection
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The tex-xemtex collection displayed on the picture is Win32 specific. It holds a number of bonus packages (Figure 4, at the bottom) which can be installed automatically and individually: Ghostscript (the PostScript interpreter), XEmacs editor preconfigured for TeX, tools like Perl, ImageMagick, Ispell. None of these packages are selected by default.
On this page, you also have the information about disk space needed, for each object, and for the set of those who are selected, and also the disk space available on the partition selected for the installation. Last, you can choose to install or not the documentation files and source files associated with each package.
Packages Page Win32
Support
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Review Page File Copy
Page
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Configuration Page Final
Page
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Please be aware that the choice of cluster size on DOS disk partitions can radically affect the size of your TeX installation. The support tree has hundreds of small files, and it is not unusual for a complete installation to take up to four times the amount of space used on the CD.