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On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 20:44:37 -0700
Salman Khilji
1) I want to know the simplest way (and the minimal way) to compile PDFTeX on Windows. From the manual, I see that you have to download
I want to be able to compile pdfTeX from sources using an already available DSP (MS Visual C++ project file)---this means it should somehow use an already existing config.h file.
I downloaded the MikTeX sources, but it comes with 65535 other files and directories that I do not need and also mandates the download of Cygwin.
I don't think there is an 'easy and minimal way' atm, especially not for pdftex which needs a number of libraries available at compile time.
2) Basically, I want to learn a little about the internals of pdfTeX to investigate if I can take the PDF specific C source code out of it and
Isolation would be very hard I believe. pdftex makes changes all over (e.g. to allow justification improvements and creation of arbitrary pdf objects).
somehow use then in the TeX++ project (which is a reincarnation of CommonTeX, which was an implementation of TeX written in C from scratch by Pat Monardo).
Tell me more (off-list), it seems we are doing more or less the same thing! You might want to look at the sources on this location: http://www.metatex.org/ The CXTeX sources are not bug-free, but it compiles usable pdf documents cf. "pdfetex". They are based on a manual conversion (by me) of the web sources. It is a lot easier to setup than a full blown TeX installation, but it does use autoconf, so it will need some work to get it compile without msys/cygwin. Greetings, Taco