4 Availability

4.1 Where to get fpTeX

You can find the fpTeX home on the Web here:
http://www.fptex.org/

The current fpTeX release is available from any CTAN (see also the section 4.4) site in the directory :
ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/systems/win32/fptex/.

The main ftp site for fptex is ftp://ftp.dante.de/pub/fptex/ from where beta versions of fpTeX and additionnal tools are available. This main site is mirrored (partly only!) daily by the CTAN backbones in their systems/win32/fptex directory.

You can reach me at my email address: mailto:Fabrice.Popineau@supelec.fr.

The TeX Users Group is kindly hosting a mailing-list dedicated to fpTeX. This is a very low volume one. It is used for announcements, bugs reports or as well to discuss about improvements or various users problems. To subscribe, send a message to mailto:majordomo@tug.org with subscribe fptex in the body.

4.2 What’s in this port

The distribution is made of the following binaries packages:



Programs using the kpathsea library


TeX 3.14159 the TeX compiler
metafont 2.7182 the font compiler
MetaPost 0.641 graphic language along METAFONT style, produce nice postscript figures,
metafontware support tools for METAFONT
TeXware support tools for TeX
e-TeX 2.1 the e-TeX extension to TeX
Omega 1.11 a TeX extension towards Unicode (and much more)
pdfTeX 0.14f a TeXcompiler that can produce PDF
mktex* support programs for generating missing font files, fmtutil for building formats
BibTeX 0.99C the bibliography compiler
BibTeX8 3.71 the same, but rewritten in C and designed for 8 bits character sets
ChkTeX a TeX and LaTeX syntax checker
CJK Utilities set of tools to handle Far-East fonts
dtl translates DVI files into human readable format and vice-versa
dvi2tty previews DVI files on a text mode console
dvidvi helps with pagination problems
dviljk 2.6 prints on LaserJet printers
dvipdfm 0.12.8b converts DVI into PDF format
dvipdfm 5.86d converts DVI into Postscript format
gsftopk 1.19.1 rasterizes Type 1 fonts into PK fonts
HBF to GF font format converter
Ispell Spell checker with American, English, German and French dictionaries, to be used in conjunction with Emacs
lacheck cheks your LaTeX files without actually compiling them
ltx2rtf 4.3 converts LaTeX files to RTF files
makindexk 2.13 processes index files
musixflx helps writing music
odvipsk converts Omega extended DVI files to Postscript
owindvi 0.67 previews Omega extended DVI files
ps2pkm 1.5 another rasterizer for Type 1 files
seetexk various tools to manipulate DVI files
t1utils 1.20 tools to assemble and disassemble Type 1 fonts
ttf2pfb, ttf2pk, ttfdump a collection of tools to manipulate TTF fonts
TeX4ht converts TeX or LaTeX files to HTML
texinfo the GNU technical documentation package relying on TeX
windvi 0.67 previews DVI files


Other programs supplied


psutils a collection of tools to manipulate Postscript files
gzip, bzip2 compressors with their DLLs
PNG tools supplementary tools to handle PNG files
TIFF tools supplementary tools to handle TIFF files
Jpeg to PS converter from the JPEG format to Postscript
NetPBM a collection of tools to handle, transform and convert graphic files of various format
ImageMagick anoter collection of tools to handle, transform and convert graphic files of various format
TeXSetup the setup program
EPS to PDF converter using Ghostscript


Supplementary packages of interest


Ghostscript and Ghostview Postscript viewer system, comes in GPL’ed version and non-free (latest) version
NTEmacs 20.7 The Editor, preconfigured to run with AUC-TeX and Ispell
XEmacs 21.2b34 An enhanced Emacs (?)
Perl 5.6.0 Complete with Win32 bonus and Tcl/Tk 8.3.1
French.sty Style to typeset in French
PFE Generic editor configured for TeX
WinShell 2.0 TeX oriented editor
texshell TeX oriented editor


and the following style files packages: Work in progress

To be complete, you will find in annexe 18 the rough listing of the complete binary distribution.

4.3 What to get ?

You need one of the following:

  1. the files from:
          ftp://ftp.dante.de/pub/fptex/0.4/TeXSetup.exe
    ftp://ftp.dante.de/pub/fptex/0.4/tpm
    ftp://ftp.dante.de/pub/fptex/0.4/zip
    ftp://ftp.dante.de/pub/fptex/0.4/setupw32

    You can grab all these files easily by retrieving successfully wget.exe and getfptex.bat in some temporary directory. Run this .bat file and it will download the needed parts.

  2. an image of the current TeX-Live CD-ROM, available from you LUG, from the TUG office or from CTAN in systems/texlive.

When you have one of these two sets of software, run the TeXSetup.exe program and refer to the section 5.

4.4 CTAN: obtaining other TeX related software

CTAN is the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network, a network of ftp servers where you can get (almost) every thing that is related to TeX. CTAN has three backbones

Germany
ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/
UK
ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/
USA
ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/

and several mirrors. You can obtain a list of the current CTAN mirrors as
ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/CTAN.sites

Many of the servers (and at least the backbones in Germany and the UK) support compression on the fly, i.e. you can download the contents of a directory and all its subdirectories as a .zip of tar.gz file. Simply add the suffix .zip of .tar.gz to the URL of the directory to download.

There is also a searchable index for CTAN at
http://ctan.tug.org/cgi-bin/ctan-web-search
and
http://www.dante.de/cgi-bin/ctan-index