On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 4:03 PM, Joost Verburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The standard installer already bundles Ghostscript and ImageMagick in a > portable way (no registry keys need to be modified).
That sounds interesting. I know that LyXLauncher does some magic, but I was not able to figure out what it was. Is there any way to check what LyXLauncher does to the environment? Anyway, I have managed to put my experience down in the Wiki at http://wiki.lyx.org/Windows/PortableInstallation . It is certainly not easy or painless, but I think a few small changes could improve the process significantly. Maybe the issues I had are bugs? The first problem I had was related to the path. Ghostscript was not really happy, and for some reason convert would not find ghostscript. I had to do the following changes to get previews and eps->pdf conversion working (the first three lines may or may not be necessary, I did not test them individually): path %LYX_DIR%python;%path% path %LYX_DIR%bin;%path% path %LYX_DIR%imagemagick;%path% set GS_DIR=%LYX_DIR%ghostscript\ path %GS_DIR%bin;%path% set GS_LIB=%GS_DIR%lib;%GS_DIR%fonts;%GS_DIR%Resource The other issue was that convert would not recognise ghostscript. I read that @PSdelegate@ in delegates.xml relies on registry keys, and indeed replacing it with gswin32c.exe solved the issue. This was necessary to get previews working for eps files. Finally I keep getting an error message from reconfigure about "chklatex.ltx", which caused by the platex check. It seems like the PLATEX variable is empty, and it calls the argument instead if cmdOutput(PLATEX + ' chklatex.ltx').find('pLaTeX2e') != -1: which is not recognised as an executable or an association. And then there is a problem with TeX Live 2008. The new portable function tl-portable.bat is very nice, but unfortunately it is so inflexible that it can only start a console, and not another program. Changing this may be easy, but it would require some advanced "batch language" tricks, which is not my specialty. Regards, Thomas
