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2.7 Installation under MS Windows

Installation of AUCTeX is a bit more complicated, but we are working to resolve the issues involved. Please report success/failure to us at `auc-tex@sunsite.dk'. Here are the steps to perform:

  1. The installation of AUCTeX will require the MSYS tool set from http://www.mingw.org. If you have the Cygwin tool set from http://cygwin.com installed, that should do just fine as well, but it is quite larger and slower.

    If you are installing AUCTeX with one of those sets for an Emacs compiled in a different one, you should try to avoid tool-specific path names like `/cygwin/c'. Instead, use the `c:' syntax. It might also help to use forward slashes instead of the backward slashes more typical for MS Windows: while backward slashes are supposed to work if properly escaped in the shell, this is one area easily overlooked by the developers. The same holds for file or directory names with spaces in them. Of course, we want to hear about any problems in that area.

    Compiling Emacs is outside of the scope of this manual. AUCTeX itself does not require a C compiler for installation.

  2. Install GNU Emacs from http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/windows/emacs/ or XEmacs from http://www.xemacs.org.

  3. You need a working TeX installation. One popular installation under Windows is MikTeX. Another much more extensive system is TeX live which is rather close to its Unix cousins.

  4. Now the fun stuff starts. Unpack the AUCTeX distribution into some installation directory. Do not unpack it right into your Emacs' own directories: the installation will copy the material that needs to be placed there. Keep the installation directory separate: you can remove its contents after installation completes. Since you are reading this, you probably have already unpacked AUCTeX, but it should still be easy to move it elsewhere now.

  5. Ready for takeoff. Start some shell (typically bash) capable of running configure, change into the installation directory and call ./configure with appropriate options.

    Typical options you'll want to specify will be

    --prefix=drive:/path/to/emacs-directory
    which makes sure that (1) the AUCTeX manual will be installed in the `info/' directory of your Emacs installation and (2) the automatically generated global style hooks will be installed in the `var/' directory of your Emacs installation. If you are collecting stuff like that in a central directory hierarchy (not untypical with Cygwin), you might want to specify that here instead. You stand a good chance that this will be the only option you need to supply, as long as your TeX-related executables are in your system path, which they better be for AUCTeX's operation, anyway.

    --with-emacs
    if you are installing for a version of Emacs. You can use `--with-emacs=/path/to/emacs' to specify the name of the installed Emacs executable, complete with its path if necessary (if Emacs is not within a directory specified in your PATH environment setting).

    --with-xemacs
    if you are installing for a version of XEmacs. Again, you can use `--with-xemacs=/path/to/xemacs' to specify the name of the installed XEmacs executable complete with its path if necessary. It may also be necessary to specify this option if a copy of Emacs is found in your PATH environment setting, but you still would like to install a copy of AUCTeX for XEmacs.

    --with-lispdir=/dir
    This may be needed for GNU Emacs installation, but hopefully configure should figure this out by itself. Don't use this for XEmacs, rather use

    --with-packagedir=/dir
    which gives the location of the package directory for XEmacs where stuff should be installed. Again, hopefully this is not necessary to specify.

    --with-auto-dir=/dir
    Directory containing automatically generated information. You should not normally need to set this, as `--prefix' should take care of this.

    Some additional information about the above options may be found in 2.2 Configure.

  6. If you need to use the prebuilt documentation (see above), now is the time to unpack it over the rest of the installation directory.

  7. Run make in the installation directory (we have had one report that Emacs did not manage to byte compile the Elisp files, and that had to be done by hand. No idea about what might have gone wrong there).
  8. Run make install in the installation directory.

  9. For GNU Emacs, the recommended way to activate AUCTeX is to add the following line to your `.emacs' file:

     
    (require 'tex-site)
    

    The configuration for Windows systems is probably not quite fitting. Instead of loading `tex-site.el' in that manner, you might want to load `tex-mik.el' (for MikTeX) or `tex-fptex' (for fpTeX) instead. Those will lead to somewhat more appropriate values for your system. You can always use

     
      M-x customize-group RET AUCTeX RET
    

    in order to customize more stuff, or use the `Customize' menu.

  10. Load a `.tex' file Emacs or XEmacs and see if you get the `Command' menu. Try using that to LaTeX the file.

Well, that about is all. Have fun!


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This document was generated by Davide G. M. Salvetti on February, 5 2005 using texi2html