Luke Stutters wrote: > Hello all. I've just got Instant Preview working on a 1.3.5 Windows XP > Home install. Together with a working image preview, this makes LyX a > very nice system for preparing Maths documents indeed.
Well done. > However, installation was very difficult. I'd like to share my > experiences here so I don't have to work on my Friday presentation > (which is about something a bit different). It might be a good idea to add some of this to the wiki pages that you've been busy reading. > I had to make quite a few modifications to the PATH variable during the > install process. This is well beyond the abilities of most users of the > Windows platform. I think this is likely to put a lot of people off > using LyX. I think that you need Administrator privileges in order to > change the PATH in Windows XP - can this be done by a script? You don't need Administrator privileges. However, I'm working to integrate Ruurd's port into the official LyX sources. I've been listening in on the experiences of Windows users that they've posted to this list, so keep 'em coming ;-) One thing that LyX 1.3.6 (should it be released) and the 1.4.x series will have is a "path_prefix" entry in your "preferences" file. You'll be able to modify this from the Edit->Preferences file. > The ImageMagick image conversion did not work properly at first because > there is another 'convert.exe' in the PATH by default. In order to get > round this, I renamed the ImageMagick file to 'convert2.exe' and changed > lyx\share\lyx\scripts\convertDefault.sh to run 'convert2' instead. This > fixed the image conversion which makes inserting images a lot more > convenient than before. Is there a better way to fix this? FYI, it looks like your points about 'convert.exe' are in the process of being merged into the WindowsSetup page: http://wiki.lyx.org/pmwiki.php/Playground/RobSaundersSandbox > In any case, it didn't work out of the box and I think most people > would just give up on it. <shrug>Too bad.</shrug> > Surely a script could do this for the user automatically? Surely you jest? There are only a few of us doing any coding and none of us use Windows much. It's difficult enough trying to handle all of the different flavours of *nix. Of course, if someone were to step up to the plate and volunteer to become the "Windows package maintainer", taking care of such "minutiae", then things might change... > Next, I had to put gswin32 on my PATH, install Python 2.4 (and add this > to the PATH), remove the old python.exe from the lyx\bin directory and > then use the Edit->Preferences fix for lyxpreview2bitmap.sh which is in > the wiki. Why did you need to install python if you went on to use the shell-script version of the script? If you *are* using the shell script version of the script, I've been lead to understand that using "gswin32c" will prevent the annoying appearence of the console window when the script is triggered. > Now it works, it is fantastic but I wonder how many people are prepared > to go to all this trouble to get it working? It's a shame that it was so > difficult to do. Surely a clever programmer can come up with a magic > 'install lyx under Windows' program that takes care of all this? Maybe. Note that at the moment we don't offer any support for LyX on Windows at all because collectively we know next to nothing about the platform (and for various other political reasons that are becoming redundant with the advent of Qt3/Win Free at http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/qt3-win32/ ... -- Angus
