[tex-live] TL2004: Technical problems and testing

David Kastrup dak at gnu.org
Wed May 12 17:09:32 CEST 2004


"Fabrice Popineau" <Fabrice.Popineau at supelec.fr> writes:

> > David Kastrup has written on the tetex-pretest list:
> >     Uh oh.  As I said, preview-latex works by analyzing error messages.
> >     Those need to be in 8bit.  There are several Unix implementations with
> >     broken locales, and the Windows implementations tend to don't have
> >     anything even faintly resembling locales, too (typical for fpTeX).
> 
> Sorry? I agree that MS doesn't implement the full set of LC_* stuff,
> but you surely can change the coding use to display text on the
> console.
> 
> I'll have a look at preview-latex with the new tex engine.

That would be very welcome.  Basically, to make it work correct with
8bit inputs, the input must be echoed cleanly in error messages, not
using things like ^^a1 or so.

>From what Thomas described, it would appear that the new Web2c engine
would make that impossible on systems without properly configured 8bit
locales (which includes a lot of proprietary Unices, and also quite a
few Linux systems with default configurations).

Fabrice, if you have any suggestions with regard to our MS-Windows
installation/usage sections in the manual and with the installation
scripts, both in preview-latex as in AUCTeX (which has completely
changed in that respect in CVS, but not yet released), they would be
very welcome: we'd like to reach a state where every fool can install
and use AUCTeX out of the box, without having to revert to something
like XemTeX.

We are currently trying to get something good and complete enough for
an intermediate AUCTeX release that should, hopefully, also work with
Windows systems.  While we have currently one tester involved with
MikTeX, fpTeX is not covered by any means.

And we are also very light on XEmacs testers: basically, if some of
the testers thinks of it, he looks whether AUCTeX at least installs on
Emacs-20.7 and XEmacs-21.4.something, and appears to work
superficially.

So if you have suggestions about where to recruit more people that
help with testing, writing installation instructions and other manual
material, that would be welcome.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum



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