On Wed, Dec 07, 2011 at 03:52:55AM +0000, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:

> Here is my notes on Thai with LaTex - I am okay with either of you
> shipping it (and the source of it) with CJK or ThaiLaTeX, but I just
> like to fix a few things first:

My problem with it is that thailatex installation as described there
is over-complicated.

> - Theppitak: I tried building swath for the first time yesterday and
> found that I don't have a couple of dependencies, and I don't even
> know where to get them... that needs to be documented...

Yep, I should do so.  So far, I only described it in my Thai blogs,
as very few people refer to the project page when contacting me.
Your contact now made me realize its importance.

In brief, you just need libdatrie, from here:

  ftp://linux.thai.net/pub/thailinux/software/libthai/

Historically, swath used to bundle an outdated and unmaintained version
of libdatrie.  And that had caused maintenance problem as its word break
dictionary couldn't be modified any more, due to incompatibility with
newer command-line tools.  Meanwhile, libdatrie was rewritten for use in
the libthai project.  So, swath was later migrated to the new one instead.
That's the benefit of code sharing over bundling.

> Having written up my notes, my thoughts are clearer. I think one should
> distinguish between source bundle and distribution/packing (ready-to-use)
> bundles.
> 
> What I see the collection is this:
> 
> 1. raw font data and non-TeX derivatives (e.g. ttf's)
> 2. font agnostic TeX support files (*.enc)
> 3. per-font TeX support files that needs to be built (tfm's)
> 4. babel/TEXINPUTS files
> 
> Currently 2+4 are together in a source bundle, whereas 3 requires 1 and 2
> to build, so that gets into the situation where 4 are installed but not
> functional.
> 
> I am just proposing 2 be bundled with 1 in the source bundle. How you
> want to do distribution bundles is another matter. Theppitak mentions
> about splitting the fonts up. I think that's okay as a distribution
> packaging, but as a source package one really want to not worry about
> downloading extra bits.

And one issue I mentioned was that 2 is complicated enough to be shared
by multiple 1's.  It's better to have only one copy of 2.  Bundling it
in multiple 1's would cause file conflicts between packages, or cause
maintenance costs, just like what happenned to swath in the past.

I'm talking about the source, not the "binary" distributions.

Treat thailatex like a "shared library".  It's no longer an end-user
package.  The fonts are, just like lmodern et al.

> As a distribution-packaging dependency, I think thailatex should depend
> on having one set of userable fonts; so if the fonts are splitted up *in
> ready-to-use distribution*, I would suggest that thailatex depends on the
> one font which is CMR-lookalike (That would be Norasi, right?).

The fonts are never splitted up in this sense.  Rather, the additional
alternatives, e.g. fonts-arundina, are newly LaTeX-ized.  So, depending
on, say, thaifonts-scalable, just results in the old set of thailatex.

The problems are:
- This exposes developer's preferences upon users.  (The new fonts
  recently enforced by the government have not been LaTeX-ized yet.
  But when it's done, there will be pressure from users of both schools
  to choose theirs.)
- This creates circular dependency.  (Can be fixed while achieving the
  need to share resources by splitting up the *.enc into another package.)

> I hope Theppitak finds it interesting how I do out-of-tree thailatex
> installation. If you have any experience with MikTeX and/or TeXLive on
> windows I'd happily add them.

I don't have Windows.  So, no comment for that.  But for your thailatex
installation instructions, it's over-complicated, and not the way it's
designed for.

The designed way:

1. Install swath

   1.1 Install libdatrie

   wget \
    ftp://linux.thai.net/pub/thailinux/software/libthai/libdatrie-0.2.5.tar.gz
   tar xzf libdatrie-0.2.5.tar.gz
   cd libdatrie-0.2.5
   ./configure
   make
   sudo make install

   1.2 Install swath

   wget \
    ftp://linux.thai.net/pub/thailinux/software/swath/swath-0.4.1.tar.gz
   tar xzf swath-0.4.1.tar.gz
   cd swath-0.4.1
   ./configure
   make
   sudo make install

2. Install thailatex

   ./configure # to install under /usr/local/texmf/
   # or:
   ./configure --texmf=${HOME}/texmf # to install under your home

   make
   [sudo] make install

3. Install fonts

   wget \
    
ftp://linux.thai.net/pub/thailinux/software/thaifonts-scalable/thaifonts-scalable-0.4.17.tar.gz
   tar xzf thaifonts-scalable-0.4.17.tar.gz
   cd thaifonts-scalable-0.4.17
   ./configure --disable-ttf --enable-latex --with-texmfdir=...
   make
   [sudo] make install

And similarly for thaifonts-arundina.  That's it.  The texhash/mktexlsr
and updmap steps should already be automatically done.

And, in fact, the zip files for thailatex and fonts released at CTAN
already include the TDS zip which should be able to extract instantly.
A MikTeX user reported me that it can be done instantly through MikTeX
tool.  But I don't have MikTeX at hand to confirm that.

I don't know about TeXLive, either, as I've never used it directly.
All my uses are through Linux distribution packages.

-- 
Theppitak Karoonboonyanan
http://linux.thai.net/~thep/

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