Begin by reading the English (*.eng) or German (*.ger) documentation files on the first disk. Where there is disagreement between this book and those files, believe the files---especially if a new version of emTeX has been released.

The emTeX distribution is a collection of ZIP files spread over six disks. You must install these files into your hard drive. If you have more than one hard disk, you may install emTeX on any drive you choose. Select one with more than 12Mb of free space, at first. You can copy the files onto another drive after you've deleted things that you don't need.

All of the emTeX files are installed in a subdirectory tree rooted at emtex. If you absolutely must use a different subdirectory tree, unpack each archive file into a temporary directory and then copy the files into the subtree you want to use. You will have to do much more extensive customization of the batch files and configuration files before emTeX will work. That sort of customization isn't described here in detail.

Make the root directory of the hard disk that you wish to install onto the current directory, and then use the pkunzip program distributed on the first disk, or any later version of pkunzip, to unpack each of the archive files. You can also use the Info-Zip version of unzip (version 5.0 or later) to unpack the archives. If you do not want the German versions of the TeX macro files, do not bother to unpack the lkurz.zip or g*.zip files on disk six.

After you have unpacked the files, you will have a directory tree rooted at \bs EMTEX containing about 12Mb of files and the following additional directories: bibinput, bmfbases, btexfmts, doc, mfbases, mfinput, MFjob, remove, texfmts, texinput, and tfm.

A lot of information about where and how things are installed for emTeX is stored in the \glo{environment}. If you are unfamiliar with the DOS or OS/2 environment, consult your operating system reference for more details. In brief, the environment is a collection of named strings. For example, your PATH is in the environment.

The emTeX distribution includes a batch file called set-tex, which sets all of the environment variables that emTeX uses. Edit this file and change all references to C: to the drive where you installed emTeX. If you installed emTeX on drive C:, you needn't change anything. The section “the section called “Deleting extra documentation”” later in this chapter describes the variables used by emTeX in greater detail.

If you are using MS-DOS and haven't already made the environment larger than its default size, you may need to do so in order to use emTeX. Insert the following command, or something like it, in your CONFIG.SYS file:

SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM /P /E:1024

This is very system-dependent. You will have to use different settings if you keep COMMAND.COM in a subdirectory or if you use a different command processor.

After you have set up the environment, make the emtex directory the current directory and test TeX by typing:

C:\ttbackslash{}EMTEX>{\bf tex}
This is emTeX, Version 3.0 [3a] (no format preloaded)
**{\bf \ttbackslash{}relax}

*{\bf This is a test}

*{\bf \ttbackslash{}bye}
[1]
Output written on texput.dvi (1 page, 224 bytes).
Transcript written on texput.log.

This will produce a small DVI file called texput.dvi. Keep this file; you can use it in a few minutes to test the previewer.

To test LaTeX, enter the command:

\$ tex &lplain testpage

See the section “the section called “Command-line Options”” in Chapter Chapter 3, Chapter 3, for an explanation of some potential problems with using the ampersand (&) character on the command line.

There are several sets of fonts available for emTeX. You should select the set that is appropriate for your printer. They are summarized in Table  Table 13.2. The CTAN directory systems/msdos/emtex contains the libraries or disks of libraries.

Not every font set is appropriate for every model of the series mentioned. If your printer isn't mentioned, use the dvidot program included with emTeX to generate an appropriate configuration file. Select the font set with the same resolution as your printer.

The PostScript fonts included in the psfonts libraries are suited primarily for previewing. The quality of many of the fonts is substandard. (They were generated from unhinted outlines with Ghostscript.) A font substitution file is provided for 300dpi, 180dpi, and 360dpi printers.

Once you have retrieved the font libraries that you need, unpack them (if they are in ZIP archives) and place the FLI files in the \bs TEXFONTS directory of the drive where you installed emTeX. The amount of disk space required depends on the font set that you install. It can be more than 5.5 megabytes. The section called “the section called “Running emTeX 386 in Windows”,” later in this chapter, provides an overview of automatic font generation under emTeX. This can save a considerable amount of disk space.

@echo off
dviscr @lj.cnf /ocr=1 /fl=-1 

@echo off
dviscr @fx.cnf /ocr=1 /fl=-1 

The complete distribution of emTeX is much larger than the practical requirements. This section discusses the pros and cons of deleting (or at least archiving) parts of the emTeX distribution.

There are two ways to customize emTeX. One way is to customize the environment variables that emTeX uses; the other is to customize the configuration files that emTeX uses for previewing and printing (configuration files have no effect on TeX itself).

It has been several years since the standard distribution of emTeX was assembled. In that time, several other releases have been made. These are beta test releases, but they are as rock-solid as the standard distribution. Personally, I encourage you to install the beta test versions, especially because they offer features not found in the standard release.

The beta test versions are stored in a series of ZIP files at CTAN in the directory systems/msdos/emtex/betatest. Table  Table 13.4 summarizes the files in the beta test distribution.\footnote{As this chapter is being written, Eberhard Mattes\index{Mattes, Eberhard} is working on a new version of \emTeX. This new version will, at some point, replace the existing beta test files, making this section somewhat out of date. Use the READ.ME files in the actual distribution as the definitive source of information.

To install the beta test versions, simply unpack the archives into your \bs emtex directory, replacing any existing files with the new versions. After you have installed the beta test versions, you can repeat the space-saving steps suggested earlier in this chapter.

What are the advantages of the beta test versions?

The 386-specific version of TeX provided by the beta test distributions of emTeX has some compelling advantages over the other TeX executables: it's a big TeX and it's fast. Unfortunately, it does not run in Windows (or some other MS-DOS environments).

The problem is memory management. In order to be large and fast, the tex386 executable relies on some advanced features of the 386 (and higher) processors. These features are provided under MS-DOS by a “DOS extender.” The DOS extender allows MS-DOS applications to use “protected mode,” where they can address more than 640Kb of memory. There are several competing standards for protected mode memory management. emx, the extender implemented in emTeX, is not compatible with the DPMI standard used by Microsoft Windows and some other MS-DOS extenders (for example, MS-DOS sessions under OS/2).

Luckily, there is a freely available MS-DOS extender, which is compatible with both DPMI and emTeX, the RSX extender. Starting with version beta-11 of emTeX, the is very easy to use.^[124]

There are two versions of the extender: rsx, for use in MS-DOS with DPMI extenders, and rsxwin, for use in Windows. Both versions are available on the CTAN archives in the directory support/msdos/dpmi/rsx.

To use the RSX extender in MS-DOS with tex386 version beta-11 or later, simply put rsx.exe somewhere on your PATH. When emTeX discovers a DPMI extender, it will use rsx instead of emx.

To use the RSX extender in Windows, you must modify the command line that is executed to run tex386. Where you currently use:

d:{\bs}path1\bstex.exe options

you must now use:

d:{\bs}path2\bsrsxwin.exe -e d:\bs path1\bstex386.exe options

The rsxwin extender will set up an extender for emTeX and then run TeX.

The new versions of the emTeX DVI drivers include a program called dvidrv, which handles automatic font generation. The dvidrv program runs the driver and if the driver indicates that fonts are missing, gives you the opportunity to use font substitution or build new fonts. The MFjob program is used to build the fonts. MFjob runs the MetaFont and GFtoPK to produce and install the necessary fonts. MFjob installs the PK files into the first directory on the font path.

The dvidrv program can be replaced by a batch file that can select an appropriate font-rendering program (something other than MetaFont, for example) to build the necessary fonts. This feature is only available in the OS/2 versions of emTeX releases 1.4t and later. The batch file in Example Example D.3 in Appendix Appendix D, Appendix D, is a replacement for dvidrv. It uses ps2pk to make PK versions of PostScript Type 1 fonts if an appropriate PFB file can be found. Otherwise, it calls MFjob in the same way that dvidrv does.

Ordinarily, emTeX does not require write access to any of its data files, so installation on a network is not a problem. The location of temporary files that must be writable is controlled with environment variables. If automatic font generation is being used, there are two applicable cautions.

First, if you use the batch file approach to automatic font generation in order to support different rendering software, be aware that your batch file must handle the fact that multiple files may be written to the same directory from different users. Don't let filenames collide.

Second, it is ideal if you can provide a single world-writable location for automatically generated fonts. If multiple users are working with similar documents, each will not need private copies of the fonts they require. If your networking software tracks the time of last file access, you can determine which files to delete from this global font area on a regular basis.