The RuG TeX installation

The current RuG TeX installation is based on the 2016 edition of TeX Live, with various add-ons.

Getting access via the menu system

Access with the Run command

For an Unmanaged Fat Client (UFC), or if you want to access a version other than the current one:

  1. Click Start / Run... and type
    \\workspace.rug.nl\aps\ServerBased\TeXLive\2016\tlaunch.exe
    You can simply copy-and-paste this string. Substitute the year of another release if that is what you want.
  2. For easier access next time, you can try to pin the TeX Live launcher to the taskbar. If this does not work, you can create a desktop shortcut instead: click within the TeX Live launcher on File / Browse the TeX Live installation. Navigate to the 2016 subdirectory, right-click on tlaunch or tlaunch.exe and select Copy. Then right-click on your desktop and select Paste shortcut. Since a desktop shortcut may not survive a logout, you may want to make a copy or backup in a safer location, e.g. somewhere under My Documents.

For home installation, see the Home installation page.

TeX Live

TeX Live is a very complete environment for working with TeX and LaTeX. It comes with large amounts of fonts, macro packages and utilities, and with comprehensive documentation.

Documentation is accessible via the Documentation menu of the launcher.

For Windows, TeX Live also includes the TeXworks editor, which has a built-in pdf viewer and allows easy switching between corresponding places in the TeX source and the pdf output (synchronization).

RuG additions

The RuG add-ons include:

TeXstudio

The preferred LaTeX editor is TeXstudio. Many LaTeX constructs and mathematical symbols are available with the push of a button, which can be a big timesaver for LaTeX newbies. It has adopted the pdf previewer of TeXworks, with tex-pdf synchronization. Besides LaTeX and pdflatex, it also supports the Unicode (la)tex engines xe(la)tex and lua(la)tex, and for bibliographies it supports both bibtex and biber. The latter is recommended when using biblatex.

TeXnicCenter

The TeXnicCenter editor is a long-time component of the RuG TeX installation. It was getting seriously behind the times until finally in 2013 a more up to date version was released.

When started for the first time, the launcher configures TeXnicCenter automatically for TeX Live. The launcher also has an entry in the Tools menu to recreate this configuration. One can use the configuration wizard built into TeXnicCenter, but that requires answering a series of questions about the location of TeX and of previewers.

TeXnicCenter is configured to preview pdf with SumatraPDF, a light-weight pdf viewer which is also part of the RuG TeX Live installation. SumatraPDF supports synchronization between tex source and pdf output: with the cursor at the desired place, click the View icon to go from the source to the pdf, and double-click in the pdf to go to the source.

The launcher menu contains a reconfiguration utility of TeXnicCenter.

LyX

LyX is a more-or-less WYSYWYG LaTeX editor. It has its own page on this site.

JabRef

JabRef is a GUI bibliography manager which can make use of online resources. You can edit bibliographic entries via a graphical interface but you can also edit the bibtex source code of individual entries directly for maximum control. It requires Java.

SumatraPDF

SumatraPDF is an extremely lightweight free viewer for pdf and various other formats. When used with TeXnicCenter, it offers source-pdf synchronization.

Epspdftk

Epspdftk is a GUI utility to convert between eps, pdf and general PostScript. It can also compute tight boundingboxes and convert to grayscale. Although it is part of TeX Live, this standalone version includes the missing pieces to make the GUI work out of the box on Windows.

Bitmap to eps

For the more common bitmapped formats, TeX Live creates a right-click bitmap2eps menu item for converting bitmaps to eps. This menu item is part of TeX Live itself.

House style LaTeX classfiles

See the house style page.

Using system fonts with XeTeX and LuaTeX

XeTeX and LuaTeX are TeX variants which support fonts from the operating system. Note that if you use such fonts, the TeX source is no longer system-independent: compiling it on different systems may lead to different results. XeTeX was originally developed for Mac OS X.

XeTeX and LuaTeX need information on installed fonts. LuaTeX creates and updates its font information cache as needed. XeTeX also tries to do this. Because later automatic updates from a XeTeX session may fail, the Tools menu contains an item for regenerating the XeTeX font cache explicitly.

The generation of a XeTeX- or LuaTeX font cache can take between a few minutes and half an hour or more.

Switching between releases

You can still access the 2015 release at
\\workspace.rug.nl\aps\ServerBased\TeXLive\2015\tlaunch.exe
as described above. If you start the launcher of the non-active installation, it will first delete all settings of the previously active release and then initialize itself. This works both from 2015 to 2016 and from 2016 to 2015. It does not matter whether you started the launcher via the Start menu, via a shortcut of your own or via a Run command.

Keep in mind that this works only until you log out, since the RES workspace manager will replace all settings with the settings of the current release.

 

RuG TeX pages last revised on December 8 2016