From: egott@triton.unm.edu (Eric Gottlieb)
Subject: Re: Help with PasTeX 1.3
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 92 17:54:59 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Distribution: na

In article <1992Dec11.155443.29541@cs.mun.ca> robertr@odie.cs.mun.ca (Robert Randell) writes:
>Hi.
>
>I am looking for help getting PasTeX 1.3 up and running. I have the entire
>package installed on my hard drive, but I really have no idea how to get the
>thing to work. The docs are all TeX files, and when I double click on their
>icons, I just get an error message "can't find default format file".
>
>Ideally, I would like someone to give me instructions on how to set up the
>program so that I can run LaTeX on a file in the form "latex <filename>".
>Also, of course, I would like to be able to process those TeX files
>containing the English docs.
>
>Also, I notice that there is no executable called 'tex' in 'bin', but 2
>programs called 'initex' and 'virtex'. What's the deal? 
>
>Please excuse my ignorance. Up to this point, I've only been using LaTeX
>on my University's system. I no nothing about TeX proper.
>
>Thanks for any help.
>
>- Robert Randell 

virtex (Virtual Tex?) is the main executable...to make it be tex
you type "virtex &plain"; to make it be latex you type
"virtex &lplain".  plain and lplain normaly live in your "formats"
directory....they are formats (duh) and are created by initex with
the comands "initex plain.tex" and "initex lplain.tex" respectivly.
plain.tex and lplain.tex live in the macros directory I believe.
Btw, gnplain and glplain are the corisponding german versions of the
plain and lplain formats.

Now, in order for initex and virtex to be able to find the files they
use, they do two things...first they look for a set of environnment
variables, the most important of which is TeXconfig which tells them
the path to the configuration file tex.cnf.  In tex.cnf (located in
the config directory) is a set of path lists telling the executables
where to find the various types of files they use.  you may need to edit
this file to reflect your set up....snoopdos would probably be a good
tool to help you in this task (snoopdos is in the fish collection).

Steps to complete your installation:
  1.  Assign Tex: to the directory where you decompressed everything.
  2.  Make an environmet variable TeXconfig which points to TeX:config.
  3.  Edit TeX:config/tex.cnf as neccisary to reflect your setup.
  4.  Alias tex to "virtex &plain" and latex to "virtex &lplain".
  5.  Add TeX:bin to your path so you can easily make use of it's files.
  6.  Make sure plain.fmt and lplain.fmt are in your formats directory;
      if they are not there, then create them with initex.
  7.  Tex your documentation (I think it's mostly tex, not latex, and
      the german stuff is done with gplain or glplain instead of plain
      or lplain).
  8.  View the resulting .dvi files with showdvi (maybe print them with
      dviprint).

I've probably forgotten lots of stuff...but this should be enough to get
you going...Two last points: first of all, you can always TeX your
documentation on your university's computer and second of all, TeX files
are just plain ascii, so, although they don't look pretty this way, they
can be read directly with a text displayer like more or a text editor
(IE: you don't have to tex your documentation in order to read it...).

Have fun!  I've been using PasTeX with the amstex, revtex, and dvips
packages and have been really quite thrilled with the output I've
generated.

	--egott@triton.unm.edu