Hello rb,

Is one of these two preferable when running ConTeXt on windows?

please don't use the subject alone, it is confusing. You can also use fptex (or texlive). I'd prefer fptex over miktex over tetex/cygwin. But I am not the person to ask, since I haven't seen a windows system in a while. Just my impression from reading some mailing lists and news groups. You might think of posting your experience to this list. Patrick -- ConTeXt wiki: http://contextgarden.net

On 8 Oct 2004, rb wrote:

Is one of these two preferable when running ConTeXt on windows?

If you ask me (Windows NT/2000/XP), none of them... When I started to learn ConTeXt, I installed miktex, but I didn't like it. Then I tried TeXLive model 2002 and while it had couple of font installation problems, once I got it to work, it worked fine. Since this spring I'm using TeXLive 2003 and once I got to as far as burning the CD (downloading problems + stupid Windows XP doesn't have built-in tools for opening .bz2 archives or burning .iso CD:s!) and found the magic line to be added to my old ConTeXt docs to make fonts work (the one about \usetypescript[adobekb][\defaultencoding]), I haven't had any problems whatsoever (or, let's say: all problems have been caused by my code, haven't found bugs in the TeXLive installation). I use NT Emacs+context.el as my editor (XEmacs would come on the TeXLive CD, but I didn't want to switch) as I'm used to GNU Emacs from before. However, even WordPad or Notepad will do, they just don't have the highlighting etc. SciTe is an editor for Windows, but even with Pragma's manual (at http://www.pragma-ade.com/show-man.pdf, fifth from top, fifth from left), installation was kind of tricky, not as easy as we Windows users are used to. On the other hand, once SciTe is installed and some commands (like 'what "build" means') have been explained to the clueless Windows+Word user, they seem to find Scite easy to master (ok, test group is really small, but you get the idea - it is a challenge to introduce something like ConTeXt into a standard office environment). There are other suitable editors out there, too, but I haven't tested them. However, if you are *only* using ConTeXt, I'd recommend downloading http://www.pragma-ade.com/context/install/mswintex.zip.bz2 (minimal CONTEXT distribution (windows)) from Pragma's website. Or, if you want something portable, grab http://www.pragma-ade.com/context/install/tex.iso.bz2 (stand-alone CONTEXT environment (iso image)), unzip, burn onto cd, insert cd into any Windows PC and use! (Disclaimer: I haven't tested the minimal version yet, will need to hog somebody elses NT for test purposes; my stand-alone version is from August and works fine with a multiple file environment. That ConTeXt CD includes a pre-configured editor, I don't know about the current stand-alone version) If your Windows doesn't recognize the bz2 archives, for example the free unzipper PowerArchiver will open it (there's also a handy command line bz2-unzipper, google for it, I don't remember the name); I think cygwin had it... And all reasonable CD burning programs (like Nero) burn .iso images, it's just XP's built-in burner that's too dumb for it (been there, tried that, cursed it....). Hmm... Maybe I should *finally* get around to continuing on my context4windows.html.... (and probably context4windowsusers.html as well and windowseditors4context.html and....) Greetings from sub-zero temperatures, Mari windows user, windows teacher (but unix mail!)

rb wrote:

Is one of these two preferable when running ConTeXt on windows?

either use fptex (tex live) or use miktex; using tetex under cygwin to me sounds like a bad idea; in that case directly running linux makes more sense 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------