in case you did not know about kerTeX distribution

[Antonio Olivares]

@all who have tried to install kerTeX and have failed, what is needed?

1) make sure that "Development Tools" is installed, if it is not then, as root user
# yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

2) install flex-static, flex and bison are installed but libl.a, or libfl.a are not in /usr/lib/ or /usr/lib64 and are not found, ./get_mk_install.sh will fail with report that it is missing:

for 32 bit fedora 
=========================================
rkconfig:  Checking LEXLIB: not found!
rkconfig:  There were 1 libes not found! Stop!
rkconfig:
rkconfig:  LEXLIB is missing:
rkconfig:
LEXLIB
       The library provided by the LEX program, `libl' or `libfl' if `flex'
       is installed and the symlink libl.a has not been made to libfl.a

=========================================

for 64 bit fedora 
=========================================
rkconfig:  Checking LEXLIB: not found!
rkconfig:  There were 1 libes not found! Stop!
rkconfig:
rkconfig:  LEXLIB is missing:
rkconfig:
LEXLIB
       The library provided by the LEX program, `libl' or `libfl' if `flex'
       is installed and the symlink libl.a has not been made to libfl.a
=========================================
# yum install flex-static 

solves this problem so make sure it is installed before you run the script.

$ wget http://downloads.kergis.com/kertex/get_mk_install.sh

The script runs as regular user, there is no need to run it as root.  

$ chmod +x get_mk_install.sh

then you may download the rest of the packages available

$ wget http://downloads.kergis.com/kertex/amstex.sh
$ wget http://downloads.kergis.com/kertex/latex.sh
$ wget http://downloads.kergis.com/kertex/graphics@latex.sh
$ wget http://downloads.kergis.com/kertex/babel@latex.sh
$ wget http://downloads.kergis.com/kertex/cyrillic@latex.sh
$ wget http://downloads.kergis.com/kertex/ams@latex.sh
$ wget http://downloads.kergis.com/kertex/cracs@latex.sh
$ chmod +x *.sh

then run 
$ ./amstex.sh install
will install amstex
$ ./latex.sh install
will install latex 
$ ./graphics at latex.sh 
will install graphics capabilities for latex

and so on.

Paths will need to be added manually to ~/.bash_profile for the shell to find tex in case you take the initiative to install it.  It can comfortable live with texlive, and tetex in that it does not aim to take over as the main tex distribution.  

dvipdfm, pdftex, pdflatex are not found in KerTeX.  But dvips is present and outputs to postcript.  AMSLatex was recently added as a package.  It is a small and portable TeX Distribution.  

To include graphics in latex documents, use
\usepackage[dvips]{graphicx}

In case you run into trouble with fonts/font generation when using -G option in dvips
$ dvips -G -t letter $1.dvi > $1.ps 

then, as root user
# echo ';ams;' > /usr/local/share/kertex/fonts/mf/KXPATH 

as it has this bug.  It will be fixed shortly.  

Should you take the plunge to try out kerTeX, and have questions, comments, observations, please let me know so I can help if needed.

Regards,


Antonio