Hi, Attached is a zip with ruby stuff. Not perfect, also not best organized but it shows some ideas. compare kpsewhich texnansi.enc tmftools.rb texnansi-enc the first alternative is a bit faster, the second can be faster when we use a serialized hash. now, say (windows) set KPSEMETHOD=drb set KPSEPORT=7000 and run tmftools --serve and next tmftools.rb texnansi-enc since we now run kpse as a service, we have a pretty fast response. One may wonder why we need such things ... but imagine (as part of a workflow): texmfstart bin:xsltproc --output whatever.xml kpse:something.xsl whoknows.xml texmfstart rlxtools --manipulate kpse:test.rlx whatever.rlg we can now save calls to kpsewhich. texmfstart already has many built in optimizations to limit the number of calls and kpsefast also has some caching. Btw, the server serves multiple trees at the same time. (I have to reshuffle the kpse classes/modules a bit.) Other new features involve passing environment variables. In threaded scripts the problem is that the environment hash is shared. This means that one cannot easily do something ENV['TEXMF']= = "..." system("texexec ...") in treads because each thread may have different assignments to TEXMF. For this purpose, texmfstart already had: --tree=/mytex/version-1 with setuptex.tmf is part of the minimal distributions and and is just a series of assignments. This file is put in the root of a tree. (btw, this makes it easy to put several trees on the wiki and to select a version; it's juts a matter if adding the --tree switch) # usage: texmfstart --tree=f:/minimal/tex ... # # this assumes that calling script sets TEXPATH without a trailing # slash; %VARNAME% expands to the environment variable, $VARNAME # is left untouched; we also assume that TEXOS is set. TEXMFMAIN = %TEXPATH%/texmf TEXMFLOCAL = %TEXPATH%/texmf-local TEXMFFONTS = %TEXPATH%/texmf-fonts TEXMFEXTRA = %TEXPATH%/texmf-extra TEXMFPROJECT = %TEXPATH%/texmf-project VARTEXMF = %TMP%/texmf-var HOMETEXMF = TEXMFOS = %TEXPATH%/%TEXOS% # OSFONTDIR = %SYSTEMROOT%/fonts TEXMFCNF = %TEXPATH%/texmf{-local,}/web2c TEXMF = {$TEXMFOS,$TEXMFPROJECT,$TEXMFFONTS,$TEXMFLOCAL,$TEXMFEXTRA,!!$TEXMFMAIN} TEXMFDBS = $TEXMF TEXFORMATS = %TEXMFOS%/web2c/{$engine,} MPMEMS = %TEXFORMATS% TEXPOOL = %TEXFORMATS% MPPOOL = %TEXPOOL% PATH > %TEXMFOS%/bin PATH > %TEXMFLOCAL%/scripts/perl/context PATH > %TEXMFLOCAL%/scripts/ruby/context EXAMPLEROOT = %VARTEXMF% TEXINPUTS = MPINPUTS = MFINPUTS = In addition to this file, one can also feed an extra file with the --environment option. This means that one can leave most dirty details to texmfstart and keep scripts simple. Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------