[Info-vax] LaTeX on VMS

[Peter Flynn]

On 02/21/2016 07:31 PM, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> I'm still chugging along with 3.14159.  When occasionally a package is 
> missing, I download it.  However, my LaTeX installation on VMS is 
> getting long in the tooth, almost 20 years old now.  So much has changed 
> since then that it would probably be a good idea to do a fresh 
> installation, rather than try to upgrade it.  Back in the day, there was 
> [TEXMF] from Ralf Gärtner on the freeware CD.

I don't know who maintains the VMS distribution. I used to use it when
we had a VAX, but that hasn't been for a long time.

> Presumably it is just a few executables which are VMS specific, 

I believe that is the case; but quite a lot of executables, as the full
distro comes with a lot of utilities.

> while 
> all of the style files, classes, documentation and so on should be 
> platform-independent, 

Yes, they're all plaintext files.

> as well as the fonts.  (Better fonts are probably 
> the most important thing for me.  I've always found font installation to 
> be rather tricky.)

I never tried installing fonts under VMS. I would expect that if XeLaTeX
works under VMS, though, it wouldn't really matter where you put them,
if you don't need them for other (non-TeX) applications.

> These days, with disks so cheap (10 cents per GB or whatever), is there 
> any reason not to have EVERYTHING in a LaTeX installation?  

No, I always install texlive-full plus all the bells and whistles.

> If so, I 
> could just unpack that.  Probably my old executables should still work, 
> but I would like to have newer ones, preferably compiled and linked on 
> my system with a sensible build procedure.

I have no idea how stable VMS is nowadays.

> Does anyone have a relatively new LaTeX installation on VMS?  How easy 
> would it be for me to get it?

If it was stable, a copy from an old CTAN DTD should work, but a new
copy would be preferable.

///Peter