Hi Don
The only visual thing in miktex is yap (dvi previewer), but in the
version 1.20x it is flaky. I didn't see yet 2.0, which is announced very
recently.
I use MikTeX almost same way I use tetex - from (nt)emacs. I customized
the auctex emacs package so that it understands when and how to rebuild
a DVI when the source M-Tx file changed.
In ntemacs, you press C-cC-c when you're done with the source and it
detects what operation is due at that moment: TeX or LaTeX, View
(yap/xdvi), bibtex, etc. You may extend and customize the list of these
operations, e.g. I added a script which calls subsequently prepmx,
pmxab, musixflx etc in a necessary order.
Moreover, emacs enables to visually control versions, so that I can
asynchronously edit same text under windows and on another unix
workstation, and then merge the results.
For the true human-editable TeX source (not PMX M-Tx output) emacs
allows and guides inserting command names into the text, etc.
There are several shells implementing wizard-like functions over the
edited TeX source, but they are never approached emacs as a general
purpose editor. Moreover, the ability to control external processes from
emacs makes the latter effectively an _editor of the objective reality_
:-) -- a control center from which you influence everything which
happens in your computer.
You can grab my local installation (1.20e) from here:
http://www.sobor.org/hip/installation/. They are all self extracting
archives which you run at c:\. After this you add c:\texmf\miktex\bin
and c:\localtexmf\miktex\bin into your path. If you grab ntemacs, you
also grab dot.emacs, rename to .emacs and place it where HOME points to
(c:\ if it's not set). then you run addpm.exe.
My configuration of texmf/localtexmf contains all the necessary (though
not the very latest) musix packages, including exe binaries for PMX and
M-Tx.
Some stuff which you find there may be redundant for you (say, macros to
work with Church-Slavonic texts), but they will not hurt your PC anyway
:-).
Full size of this installation almost coinsides with the size of the
default installation of MS Office :-).
Alexander
Don Simons wrote:
>
> I just got a new laptop and tried installing MikTeX, which I recall
> hearing was supposed to be pretty good. So far, to say the least,
> I'm highly unimpressed. I expected a windows interface for
> configuring and running the program. Not only can't I find any such
> thing, but it seems this is really a set of DOS programs, except that
> the "setup wizard" did nothing about setting any environment
> variables or modifying my path. Is this any better than emtex??? As
> far as ease of installation and use, seems like quite a step backward
> so far. Am I missing something?
>
> --Don Simons
