texlivewinedt
I'm preparing a macro for WinEdt and need to know a few things about WinEdt 7/8 with TeX Live. Unfortunately I am a MiKTeX user, and I call on a TeX Live + WinEdt user in order to get the following information:
Does WinEdt know what is the path to the texmf-local root directory without having to tell it via the 'TeX Options' tab in the Options->Execution Modes menu item? To be sure, it would be enough to execute a macro with just one line:
Prompt("TeX-Local");
There are several reasons:
(In the following sections see “package” in a broader meaning including also scripts, binaries etc.)
The TeX distributions do not install all available packages known in the TeX world. TeX Live includes only packages, which come with a free licence; MiKTeX is not that strict about that, but, as far as I see, both distributions do include only packages, which are available on CTAN. Still today an uncountable amount of packages is obtainable only on their own web sites. You could include these packages into the normal tree, but very likely you would lose them on a distribution update. Also they would not automatically be updated by the package managers, you need to do this manually for your own. In a local texmf tree in my humble opinion this is obvious, hidden in the main texmf tree this can easily be forgotten.
For a couple of packages you can get test versions. These should in no way go into the normal package tree (with overwriting the stable version!). The local texmf directory is always searched first, and so, if there exist two versions of the same package, the test version ist found before the regular.
For some packages and utilities you can configure preferred settings, which will be saved in configuration files and are to be contained on an update of the TeX distribution. So they must be in a local tree. (Note: For this purpose there are special local trees pre-installed.)
Select custom install in the installer
Toggle portable edition (highlighted in red)
Best Answer
First of all, a clarification. Adding a value in "TeX Local Root" in the Execution Modes interface (TeX Options page) does nothing more than setting a WinEdt internal variable called
TeX-Localwhich is not used in the defaults.You can use its value (when set), for example, for adding the local TEXMF directory to WinEdt's input directives, Tree interface and so on.
This variable is accessible inside scripts as
%$('TeX-Local');But in your case, I think you are looking for a method to retrieve the contents of the environment variable
TEXMFLOCALand this is certainly possible.In fact, an environment variable is accessible in WinEdt scripts as
%@('EnvVar');. So it suffices to use"%@('TEXMFLOCAL');\scripts"to have the path you need.Note that in certain cases (when the above variable needs to be expanded) it might not work. In such a case you need to fully expand the path by adding
@@before it, that is to say@@"%@('TEXMFLOCAL');\scripts"(this has been introduced, IIRC, in v7.1).