Emacs, LaTeX, and UNIX Tools for Windows Users

Note:

• The major components below are automatically available in Linux with very little effort (e.g., RedHat, Mandrake, Debian)
• Click here for an article describing why Linux/Unix is superior to Microsoft Windows in almost every way.
• Read Allin Cottrell's Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient article

It is almost impossible to keep current on all components of Emacs and LaTeX that might be of interest to statisticians. The documents available from this page are already out of date. To install zip files you get from here, it is recommended that you use unzip95 from here or a current version of WinZip (WinZip is required to install Emacs). It is extremely important that you unzip files into the indicated target directories.

• Windows 95/98 Desktop Folder for navigating the WWW to learn more about, and obtain current software for, LaTeX, Emacs, Cygwin32, and other tools. Unzip desktop.zip into c:\Windows for Win 95/98 or into c:\Documents and Settings\youruserid for NT/Windows 2000. This will add a new folder called Doc Processing to your desktop. There are many shortcuts that will be created that point to software you probably don't have installed, such as Mayura Draw, Ghostview, etc. Should you decide to install these, these short cuts will become active should you install the software in the same directories referred to in these short cuts. Many other links are to the WWW (e.g., FAQs for Emacs, online help for LaTeX) so these will be instantly available to you.
• Xemacs is probably the easiest version of Emacs to install and use on Windows.
• Click here to download utilities.zip. Extract the part of it you need into c:. Add c:\utilities to the path in your c:\autoexec.bat file (along with other changes listed for autoexec.bat below) and restart your computer to make the new path take effect.

Once you have Xemacs installed you will have access to the latest versions of the AucTeX, RefTeX, and ESS Emacs packages. You can use the Xemacs Tools Packages menus to install or update these packages as needed.

The utilities directory also installed other useful programs. Three are ispell and versions of telnet and ftp that work well with Emacs.

Click here to get the GNU Emacs Reference Card. Note: The card doesn't look good on the screen but it prints well.

• To get a really nice LaTeX to HTML converter by Luc Maranget, translated to Win32 by Philip Viton, click here to obtain Hevea. This will download winport.zip which you should put in a temporary area. Unlike latex2html, Hevea can translate many equations and other symbols to HTML code without the need to convert them to graphics. Once you download winport.zip, create a directory named hevea under c:\utilities and extract into c:\utilities\hevea. The above utilities installation installed c:\utilities\hevea.bat for running Hevea with this setup (and remember that c:\utilities is or should be in your path, making the hevea command available). Copy c:\utilities\hevea\hevea.sty to c:\tex\texmf\tex\latex\local after you install FPTeX (below), and run mktexlsr as described elsewhere. Also in utilities you will find a little bash shell program named htmlf that you can run .h! tml files created by Hevea through, to change the LaTeX --- into a single long dash, to change the LaTeX -- into a single dash in HTML, and to use an ordinary background color. You can run htmlf from a bash shell by typing htmlf name, which will recreate name.html making the above changes.

Hevea is handy for providing LaTeX documents to Microsoft Office users. Under Microsoft Word 97 or later you can open an .html document and convert it to Word format. Subscripts, superscripts, and other components of simple equations are preserved. Bibliography files, which Hevea automatically places in the .html file it creates, are converted nicely along with hyperlinks between the citations and the bibliographic entries. Some tables convert nicely, although unlike Internet Explorer, Word 97 does not implement all of the HTML table components you need.

• MikTeX is an excellent free LaTeX system for Windows. It comes with a nice package manager for adding components and updating styles from the Internet.
• FPTeX, another excellent free version of LaTeX for Windows. Once you are in CTAN, search for the term fptex. This points you to the latest version (probably fptex-0.6, may be installed using TeXSetup.exe on the above link. Once you install FPTeX, put local style files in c:\TeX\texmf\tex\latex\local and then:

cd \TeX\texmf \tex\bin\win32\mktexlsr 

Next, do the following to finish installation of FPTeX. Edit \tex\texmf.local\dvips\config\config.ps by deleting the following line:

o |lpr

o \\foo\bar

View ... Folder Options ... File Types Description: TeX DVI
File Assoc. Ext.: .dvi 
Content type: application/x-dvi New ... 
Action:open Browse: TeX/bin/win32/windvi

latex file compiles file.tex into file.dvi 
pdflatex file compiles file.tex into file.pdf
dvips -o file.ps file produce .ps file from .dvi file
dvips -Pwww -o file.ps file use Type 1 fonts for better screen viewing
dvips file send file.dvi to printer
bibtex file
makeindx file
windvi file .dvi viewer