General ⇒ how to find executable path

[locosafari]

Hi everyone -

I just bought a new laptop and installed TeXnic Center along with Adobe Reader Pro. As part of the set-up for TC, I am being asked about executable paths. How do I obtain these? And please be specific - I am largely computer ignorant. When I right-click on the TeXnic Center desktop icon, select "properties", and then copy and paste the target address, I get an error message that says "The application 'LaTeX' has not been found in the directory of your TeX-distribution."

Thanks, F.T.

[Eternal_student]

Hello, sorry for the bad English. The problem is that TeXnic Center is an editor for the LaTeX typing language. You need to install LaTeX (MiKTeX https://miktex.org/download or TeX Live https://www.tug.org/texlive/windows.html for Windows) in order to work.

[locosafari]

Thank you for your input. So I downloaded MikTeX from your link and when TeXnic Center asked me to enter the full path of the directory where the executables of my TeX-distribution are located, I entered the following:

C:\Users\fereb\AppData\Local\Programs\MiKTeX

This is where MiKTeX is located and yet I still get the error message stating that LaTeX has not been found in the directory of my TeX-distribution. I'm completely lost. You wouldn't by chance have the capability to do a screenshare with me and show me what exactly is going wrong?

Thanks, F.T

[Ijon Tichy]

Just search for the file pdflatex.exe. The path of this file (without \pdflatex.exe) is the executable path of your TeX distribution.

BTW: For some years there is no active support for TeXnicCenter. And because it does not have a build in PDF viewer, novices often have problems with it. So I would recommend to use TeXworks at least for the first steps. TeXworks is part of MiKTeX (and also TeX Live) for Windows and should be available in the start menu after a successful installation of MiKTeX. Because it is part of MiKTeX, it should always be able to find the other executables. As an alternative I would suggest TeXstudio. which usually is also able to find the LaTeX executables on its own.

[Eternal_student]

Thank you for your input. So I downloaded MikTeX from your link and when TeXnic Center asked me to enter the full path of the directory where the executables of my TeX-distribution are located, I entered the following:

C:\Users\fereb\AppData\Local\Programs\MiKTeX

This is where MiKTeX is located and yet I still get the error message stating that LaTeX has not been found in the directory of my TeX-distribution. I'm completely lost. You wouldn't by chance have the capability to do a screenshare with me and show me what exactly is going wrong?

Thanks, F.T

These videos explain in detail how to install LaTeX on Windows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC9PB7YvNYA&t=1s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKetjJTDSqk

I hope it helps.

[locosafari]

For Eternal_student - I will absolutely check out those videos. Thank you!

For Ijon Tichy - Your guidance has helped me get LaTeX to compile the file, but I still can't get pdf's to work. The current executable path in TeXnic Center via Build -> Viewer is

C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe

with server acroviewR21. What do I need to change to get TeXnic Center to produce an actual pdf?

Thanks! F.T.