In the case that you wish to package TeXmacs for some Linux, Unix or Knoppix distribution, it may be useful to be aware of a few points. Depending on the type of distribution and its physical support, this will allow you to optimize as a function of size, speed, or required dependencies.

General points

The development releases of TeXmacs carry four numbers, like 1.0.4.6 or 1.0.5.7. The stable releases either two or three, like 1.0, 1.0.4 or 1.1. Stable releases are rather frequent (twice or thrice a year), so we recommend to use them for all major distributions.

Please send us an email if you maintain a TeXmacs package for some distribution, so that we can maintain a list with distributions which support TeXmacs.

TeXmacs dependencies

Theoretically speaking, TeXmacs only depends on X and Guile in order to be built on Linux. In addition, you either need FreeType 2 or a TeX/LaTeX distribution such as TeTeX for the fonts (see also below).

However, several more specific features of TeXmacs depend on external programs. In particular, spell checking makes use of Ispell or Aspell, the rendering of images depends on Ghostview and/or Imlib2, the Iconv library is needed for the Html converters, and we make use of several command-line utilities and ImageMagick for conversions between different image formats. The TeXmacs package should at least recommend the installation of these other programs.

It should be noticed that Imlib 2 contains a major bug, which makes it impossible to use it in a static binary for TeXmacs. For this reason, we have disabled the use of this library by default. Nevertheless, in order to accelerate the rendering of non-Postscript images, we recommend the use of this library when using shared linking. In that case, you should configure using the –with-imlib2=yes option. In the future, we plan to find a more reliable substitute for Imlib 2.

We also notice that external libraries like Freetype 2 and Imlib 2 can be linked against TeXmacs either at compilation or at run time. In the second case, the library will only be used when it is present on the system, thereby removing one hard dependency. In order to force linking at compilation time, configure using –with-imlib2=linked and similarly for other libraries.

Font issues

In order to keep the official TeXmacs distributions reasonably small, they are shipped with only a minimal set of Type 1 fonts. For distributions on a CD or DVD, we recommend to include a more complete set of extra Type 1 fonts. Typically, the extra fonts should be merged with the set of minimal fonts and distributed in a separate package. The main TeXmacs package should then depend on the font package.

Notice that TeXmacs is no longer dependent on a TeX/LaTeX distribution such as TeTeX for the fonts. In the case when you want to remove the dependency on TeTeX, then you need to provide an even more complete set of extra fonts.

On the other limit, if TeTeX is installed, then no extra Type 1 fonts are really essential for TeXmacs to work, since Metafont will be able to generate them automatically. However, this process is quite long and tends to frighten new users. In the case of Knoppix distributions, the situation is even worse, because all fonts created by Metafont are lost whenever you turn of the computer.

Improving the boot speed

On Knoppix systems, it may be interested to shortcut several things which are done when you run TeXmacs for the first time, by making use of the TeXmacs cache. In order to do so, install a brandnew version of TeXmacs and remove your ~/.TeXmacs directory. Start TeXmacs once and ask the program to build the complete user manual using Help→Full manuals→User manual. When TeXmacs will be done, carefully copy the files

    ~/.TeXmacs/system/settings.scm
    ~/.TeXmacs/system/setup.scm
    ~/.TeXmacs/system/cache/*

to some location in the TeXmacs distributiuon. You may now modify the TeXmacs script so as to copy these files back whenever the file ~/.TeXmacs/system/settings.scm does not exist (before booting TeXmacs in the usual way). This should reduce the boot time to a few seconds.