[tex-live] experience report; suggestions

[James B. Mehl]

Dear TeX-Live team:

I recently started using a new workstation with the Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 5.3 (86_64) operating system.  Somewhat disappointed that only
tetex was provided (TeXLive is included in recent Fedora distros), I
first tried installing TeXLive from the DVD that was sent to members
last year.  The installation program failed to run from the DVD for
reasons that I did not record.  Instead, I installed the beta version of
TeXLive 2009.  The purpose of this email is to report my experience.

First, just to let you know who I am.  I've been a TeX / LaTeX user
since the early 80s, and a TUG member for about as long.  I've used TeX
under mainframes, DOS, OS/2, Windows, and mainly, since the withering
away of OS/2, linux.  While I'm reasonably competent with linux, I am
mainly a scientific programmer, not a systems programmer.  I am not a
user of rsync and would have appreciated some examples to help me obtain
files in this way.  Instead of learning more about rsync and/or wget, I
simply downloaded all the required files from the mirror in Utah on 8
August; I have not updated the system since then.

The installation went well, and my experience with this installation has
been excellent.  I was extremely pleased to see many of my favorite
extras included in the main distribution!  I have not added anything to
my local texmf tree!  Thank you!  

One suggestion, however:  I notice that you include RevTeX (American
Physical Society).  There is a related package, JASA-TeX (Acoustical
Society of America), which some users would find of interest.  It's
available here:
ftp.aip.org/asa/jasaTeX-0.1tc7.zip

It's of course your decision how many journal-specific packages you want
to include, and probably depends on the publishers policies.  I'll
simply point out what I've recently used FYI.

I've used the Springer-Verlag class svjour3.cls for a submission to
International Journal of Thermophysics, a Springer Journal.
Unfortunately, LaTeX style files are difficult to find on the Springer
site; ftp.spring.de has a general set of files in global.zip, but I
don't see the version 3.2 that I've been using there.  The Springer
files on CTAN are hopelessly out of date.

I  recently published in Metrologia, and used the Institute of Physics
macros  iopart.cls and associated files, available here:
http://authors.iop.org/atom/help.nsf/0/B042B0AF79C815B88025702000409514?OpenDocument
IOP support for LaTeX has improved greatly since I last published in
Metrologia in 2005.

TeXLive has current files for Elsevier, thank you!

*****************************************************
Now, back to my installation:

At the end of the installation the following was printed to screen:

 Add /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf/doc/man to MANPATH.
 Add /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf/doc/info to INFOPATH.
 Most importantly, add /usr/local/texlive/2009/bin/x86_64-linux
 to your PATH for current and future sessions.

This is probably a bad idea!  RHEL5 and most recent Fedoras (AFAIK) do
not use MANPATH or INFOPATH.  Setting, e.g. 
INFOPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf/doc/inf:$INFOPATH
means ONLY the info files in /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf/doc/inf are
found.  However, this may be a problem with my own lack of expertise.

For completeness, I'll also report that I got this message:
###############################################################################
fmtutil: Error! Not all formats have been built successfully.
Visit the log files in directory
  /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-var/web2c
for details.
###############################################################################

This is a summary of all `failed' messages:
`xetex -ini  -jobname=cont-en -progname=context -8bit *cont-en.ini'
failed
`xetex -ini  -jobname=xetex -progname=xetex -etex xetex.ini' failed
`xetex -ini  -jobname=xelatex -progname=xelatex -etex xelatex.ini'
failed

I'm not a xetex user so I haven't followed up on this.

Thank you very much your your work on TeXLive; I hope my feedback is of
some use.

Best wishes,

Jim Mehl

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