1 Foreword

1.1 Acknowledgements

This TeX distribution is not the result of my sole work, but rather from the work of many people. It will be difficult to list all of them, but I can always name the most important ones.

Karl Berry, and now Olaf Weber, for their work on Web2C, and for accepting my Win32 patches.

Thomas Esser for his outstanding teTeX distribution, from which I imported many ideas, and with which I try to stay comaptible as much as possible.

Sebastian Rahtz for assembling the TeX-Live CD-ROM. Sebastian as done a great job at automating the build of the most complete texmf tree and maintaining it. He also included all my Win32 binaries of his CD-ROM. I owe much to him.

Erick Frambach and Wietse Dol for having integrated this distribution into their 4AllTeX CD-ROM.

Many people helped by their reports to test and debug the distribution. Among them are Michael Basler, Tobias Burnus, Daniel Courjeon, Michael C. Grant, Klaus Hppner (who wrote some bits of this documentation), Brian Ripley, and many others.

The new TeXSetup.exe installer is based on code from 3 sources: Christian Schenk’s setup wizard for his MiKTeX distribution, WFC code by Samuel R. Blackburn and Microsoft MSDN examples; I’m thankful to them.

Last, I must grant credit to the authors of the numerous packages that are included in the distribution. Many of these packages have had many authors or maintainers as years pass, and I won’t trace each of them. However, it was a pleasure receive to support from - and maybe give some too - a few people:

1.2 What is fpTeX?

In a word, fpTeX is a free port to the various flavours of Windows - Win95, Win98, NT and Windows 2000 refered to as Win32 - of the well known distribution teTeX for Unix.

More precisely, given obvious differences between Unix and Win32, some things behave differently under fpTeX : some are still missing, some are just different, but the large majority behave just the same as under Unix. See section 4.2 for more details about the programs.

1.3 Why use teTeX under Win32

The teTeX distribution is based on Web2C.

Web2C by itself is a translator from the Pascal language to the C language. D.E. Knuth has originally written TeX in a dialect of Pascal named Web, so the name Web2C. Web2C has been build upon several authors work, but has been much enhanced recently by Karl Berry and now Olaf Weber. See section ??.

Web2C uses the Kpathsea library for files handling. This library is the main part to configure for TeX to run smoothly. It is very powerful and flexible, but quite complex too.

I began to port Web2C after leaving the Linux world for the NT world. Web2C is the most used TeX distribution in the Unix world, and the one on which many developments are based. Web2C takes you to a high level of TeXnicity : latest versions of TeX, METAFONT, MetaPost, use of the high speed search kpathsea library to name only some of its features. Web2C should satisfy the most demanding users. Moreover, its wide use makes it well tested.

Web2C had already been ported to a wide variety of OS apart from Unixes: VMS, MVS, Amiga, OS/2, DOS. Win32 has everything of a high-tech OS1, so there was no reason for Web2C not to be ported to it. It would make life easier for administrators who have Unix, Windows (and maybe others) TeX distributions to maintain. So, the main goal of the port was compatibility with the reference platforms (Unixes): administration of TeX sites should be similar. For further details on the Win32 adaptation, take look at Section 18.