[tex-live] TL and win32

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Thu, Dec 21, 2006 at 06:07:48AM +0100, Staszek Wawrykiewicz wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Dec 2006, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> 
> > [...]
> >   > As I wrote you before, I consider all those .bat files from the
> >   > Ghostscript distribution very rarely needed for TeX
> >   > applications...  We have enough scripts using GS, so I would leave
> >   > the whole mess to the (advanced) users. All in all, the installer
> >   > have to add gswin32c.exe location to PATH, and add GS_LIB env
> >   > variable.
> > 
> > It's a pity that ghostscript is under GPL so that it is not required
> > to provide the complete package.  Please excuse me for being so
> > impolite, but I find it quite annoying if people decide which software
> > other people have to use.  Are you sure that everything works if you
> > arbitrarily remove scripts?  Some scripts/programs depend on other
> > scripts/programs.  Do you have a complete overview?
> > 
> > I don't understand why you try to break everything deliberately.
> 
> Reihard, I'm very sorry:
> 1. You do not need excuse me, as I really appreciate your help, your work, 
>    and I know you and like,
> 2. I'm not going to decide what is installed by regular GS distribution,
>    I just install it and use (on win32 Gs is installed without setting 
>    PATH and any other variable, please note that),
> 3. I do not remove any script (or any other part) from Gs. Again, 
>    I proposed to install it *as is* distributed (easy to uninstall by 
>    standard win32 way), so sorry, I'm not going to break anything.
> [more of that below]   
> 
> >   >> It is much better to have a zip file which is supposed to be
> >   >> extracted in tlroot.  I'll create such a zip file tomorrow.  You
> >   >> can look into it and decide whether you want to use it or not.
> > 
> > I created such a zip file:
> > 
> >   http://ms25.ath.cx/gs8.54-win32-tl.zip
> > 
> > The directory structure is:
> > 
> >    bin/win32
> >    gs/Resource/CMap
> >    gs/Resource/ColorSpace
> >    gs/Resource/Decoding
> >    gs/doc
> >    gs/examples
> >    gs/lib
> >    gs/lib/fonts
> >    gs/man/de/man1
> >    gs/man/man1
> > 
> > The bin/win32 directory contains all the binaries, the dll, and all
> > batch files.
> 
> Hmm... Let me continue my enumeration:
> 4. Gs is an external program for TL, but needed for some batch tasks; 
>    for TL we need to provide PATH to the core Gs binaries and GS_LIB 
>    variable, as many our programs use Gs in batch mode, nothing more
> 5. users can have Gs already installed
> 6. it should be installed only on demand (see 5.)
> 7. Gs can be easily uninstalled; the standard installer does allow it 
>    (see 3.)
> 8. batch files and other scripts distributed with Gs are out of our
>    interest (I consider them rather as mostly sketches for advanced users,
>    even the most valuable for TeX users, like ps2pdf.bat, needs some
>    insight and I use it completely changed and simplified); please still
>    have in mind that Gs installed natively doesn't add the PATH etc.
> 9. so there's no need to mix TL+GS binaries and put other stuff into TL
>    tree for the above reasons
> 
> > The fonts are inside the lib directory.  It is sufficient to point the
> > GS_LIB variable to the lib directory and you don't have to care about
> > a font directory.
> 
> well, we can organise what we want, only having in mind TL's 
> perspective...
> 
> > What I have done is:
> > 
> >    * Put the fonts into gs/lib/fonts.
> >    * Create a file gs/lib/Fontmap.TeXLive.
> >    * Change gs/lib/Fontmap so that Fontmap.TeXLive is used instead of
> >      Fontmap.GS. 
> > 
> > gs/lib/fonts contains the fonts:
> > 
> >    * The famous 35 URW fonts (from CTAN, maintained by Walter Schmidt),
> >    * Bitstream Charter,
> >    * Adobe Utopia.
> 
> Fine by me, but I'm against replacing all Gs standard fonts by our
> (still having in mind that Gs is all-purpose, independent program, which 
> can be unistalled and replaced by more newer version). I'm not sure if
> fonts you proposed (removing btw. all standard ones, as you did, see 3.) 
> are enough fine or better :-). "standard" fonts distributed with Gs8.54
> contains e.g. cyrillic glyphs by Valek Flipov.
> 
> > These are the fonts mentioned in the original GS Fontmap but some of
> > them are not provided by GS.
>  
> Sorry, my task is to make TL working, not changing Gs.
> 
> >   > OK, it would be better to unzip it e.g. in just c:\gs
> > 
> > Why?  Is there any good reason to remove ghostscript from TeXLive?  
> > What do you want to achieve?
> 
> No, I don't want to remove Gs from TL, but I found a better solution how 
> to put in on TL's CD/DVD (thanks to your investigations :-)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -- 
> Staszek Wawrykiewicz
> StaW at gust.org.pl

I agree with Staszek that you have to be careful not to interfere
with a possible existing Ghostscript installation.

Have a look at the way MikTeX incorporates its own private copy of
Ghostscript: it is renamed mgs.exe, ignores environment variables
and registry settings and needs to get all its configuration
information from the command-line. And it uses fonts from the texmf
tree.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg