Others ⇒ KerTeX | New lightweight TeX/LaTeX Distribution

[olivares14031]

Dear folks,

This is an FYI, there is a new lightweight simple TeX/LaTeX distrubution called KerTeX.

It is lightweight, requires few things like bison, flex, ed, lftp, all of which are available either from source or through a package manager in Linux or BSD*. It does not have pdflatex, pdftex, dvipdfm, xdvi, but many packages can be written for the system. It is smaller than old TeTeX and has a maintainer working on it.

KerTeX is BSD licensed and should work on most systems. It is designed to be installed through a script ./get_mk_install, but it could be made into a package with some work. Users interested please download it and try it out. It is a small texing/latexing system that uses RISK framework.

Please test it out if you can, and maybe if the interest is there someone can try to package it and make it work independently even if TeX Live, teTeX, or other TeX distribution is installed.

NOTES:
User texifies, latexifies file, tex filename.tex, latex filename.tex, then runs

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$ dvips -o filename.dvi filename.ps

or

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$ dvips -t letter filename.dvi > filename.ps

then can convert to PDF using ps2pdf with Ghostcript installed

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$ ps2pdf filename.ps

If installing KerTeX, program will look for libl.a, or libfl.a and will stop in case it does not find it, if flex is installed a link may do the job. If you don't mind testing LaTeX distributions, please test it out.


Regards,


Antonio

[olivares14031]

@all folks interested in KerTeX

More packages have been added to enhance the latex capabilites. kerTeX added lm, ec, oberdiek and other packages. Please check the website out.

FYI,

If there are any linux users out there, you are welcome to try kertex out without installing. Get a copy of Porteus LiveCD and download the kertex modules for the respective arch, i.e, i486, and x86_64

http://www.porteus.org/

Look for i486 or x86_64 bit version
http://www.porteus.org/distro-download.html

The kertex modules links to download can be found in the Development section, kertex thread. Mediafire hosts these. There you may also find modules for ghostscript 9.05 and ghostscript-fonts which are needed to view output by kertex since no dvi viewer is present. Users have to process the documents through tex/latex and then run dvips for a postscript file, then can make a pdf with ps2pdf.

For a portable ide check out texmaker portable in the portable section:

http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/download.html

just follow the directions to use it.

Any questions or concerns please ask, and I will do my best to answer.