The recommended LaTeX port?

[Tomasz Rola]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2018 at 04:13:17PM +0200, Polytropon wrote:
> On Sun, 19 Aug 2018 20:41:50 +0700, Victor Sudakov wrote:
> > Dear Colleagues,
> > 
> > Which is *the* \LaTeX distribution for FreeBSD currently?
> > 
> > I remember last time I needed \LaTex around a dozen years ago, I used
> > the teTeX port, but cannot find it now.
> 
> This is currect, teTeX has been discontinued. The consensus
> is to use TeXlive which is in FreeBSD ports, but is offered
> for many other platforms, too.
> 
> 
> 
> > Cyrillic support is crucial, direct output to PDF is very desirable,
> > dependency on GUI libs and tools is not desirable.
> 
> With TeXlive, you have the same tools (and more packages)

In particular, pdftex and pdflatex are part of my TeXlive
installation. Although I would probably try a bit more traditional way
first, i.e. latex -> dvi -> dvips -> some ps2pdf converter, I have no
idea which "ps2pdf" is better/best. There is also dvipdf. Manpage for
pdftex mentions problems with including *.eps figures and *.ps files,
if you want to use those, they need to be converted to pdf files
first. 

Disclaimer: I only used pdftex in a simple converter script,
scrambling many jpgs into one pdf file, so I have no other real life
experience with it.

A practical note: I tend to have bigger latex documents in multiple
files (one chapter = one file) and keep it organized via
Makefile. This can help a lot if one has to convert files, recompute
datas and redo plots few times a day.

[...]
> On Sun, 19 Aug 2018 20:53:46 +0700, Victor Sudakov wrote:
> > I forgot to mention that I've tried a couple of online editors like
> > https://www.sharelatex.com/ but they all lacked Cyrillic support
> > miserably (Cyrillic characters either did not show in the compiled
> > output, or showed as mojibake).
> 
> Just use a normal editor inside a terminal that can input
> and display cyrillic letters. Even ye olde xterm can do it.
> Make sure you set your environment variables correctly,
> i. e., en_US.UTF-8.
> 
> I have no idea if LyX, the WYSIWYG variant for LaTeX, is
> still available. Personally, I prefer YAFIYGI because it
> works.

Myself, I think for anything bigger than page of text, emacs is the
ultimate editor (and I believe it can be setup to handle Cyryllic
rather easily, but I have never done this). I also think that WYSIWYG
is overhyped. A lot. Of course, using emacs means one has to
periodically check the document (i.e. in my case, run make or make
view) - which is inevitable anyway, because there might be some bug in
a WYSIWYG editor which would only manifest in compiled document. I
guess it is less problematic if one goes into straight LaTeX markup
from the start.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **