In a word, fpTeX is a free port to Windows 9x and Windows NT– refered to as Win32 – of the well known distribution teTeX for Unix.
More precisely, given obvious differences between Unix and Win32, some things behave differently under fpTeX : some are still missing, some are just different, but the large majority behave just the same as under Unix. See section 1.4 for more details about the programs.
The teTeX distribution is based on Web2C.
Web2C by itself is a translator from the Pascal language to the C language. Donald E. KNUTH has originally written TeX in a dialect of Pascal named Web, so the name Web2C. Web2C has been build upon several authors work, but has been much enhanced recently by Karl Berry and now Olaf Weber. See section 11.
Web2C uses the Kpathsea library for files handling. This library is the main part to configure for TeX to run smoothly. It is very powerful and flexible, but quite complex too.
I began to port Web2C after leaving the Linux world for the NT world. Web2C is the most used TeX distribution in the Unix world, and the one on which many developments are based. Web2C takes you to a high level of TeXnicity : latest versions of TeX, METAFONT, MetaPost, use of the high speed search kpathsea library to name only some of its features. Web2C should satisfy the most demanding users. Moreover, its wide use makes it well tested.
Web2C had already been ported to a wide variety of OS apart from Unixes: VMS, MVS, Amiga, OS/2, DOS. Win32 has everything of a high-tech OS1, so there was no reason for Web2C not to be ported to it. It would make life easier for administrators who have Unix, Windows (and maybe others) TeX distributions to maintain. So, the main goal of the port was compatibility with the reference platforms (Unixes): administration of TeX sites should be similar. For further details on the Win32 adaptation, take look at Section 8.
You can reach me at my email address: mailto:Fabrice.Popineau@supelec.fr.
The TeX Users Group is kindly hosting a mailing-list dedicated to fpTeX. This is a very low volume one. It is used for announcements, bugs reports or as well to discuss about improvements or various users problems. To subscribe, send a message to mailto:majordomo@tug.org with subscribe fptex in the body.
Here are a few fpTeX related pages:
http://www.ese-metz.fr/ popineau/fptex/.
The released files are on CTAN and any CTAN mirror in systems/web2c/fptex.
These files are mirrored from fpTeX's home: ftp://ftp.ese-metz.fr/pub/tex/win32
You can also find beta versions of various programs in:
ftp://ftp.ese-metz.fr/pub/tex/win32-beta
The distribution is made of the following packages:
| Programs using the kpathsea library | |
| TeX 3.14159 | the TeX compiler |
| metafont 2.7182 | the font compiler |
| MetaPost 0.641 | graphic language along METAFONT style, produce nice postscript figures, |
| metafontware | support tools for METAFONT |
| TeXware | support tools for TeX |
| e-TeX 2.1 | the e-TeX extension to TeX |
| Omega 1.11 | a TeX extension towards Unicode (and much more) |
| pdfTeX 0.14f | a TeXcompiler that can produce PDF |
| mktex* | support programs for generating missing font files, fmtutil for building formats |
| BibTeX 0.99C | the bibliography compiler |
| BibTeX8 3.71 | the same, but rewritten in C and designed for 8 bits character sets |
| ChkTeX | a TeX and LaTeX syntax checker |
| CJK Utilities | set of tools to handle Far-East fonts |
| dtl | translates DVI files into human readable format and vice-versa |
| dvi2tty | previews DVI files on a text mode console |
| dvidvi | helps with pagination problems |
| dviljk 2.6 | prints on LaserJet printers |
| dvipdfm 0.12.7b | converts DVI into PDF format |
| dvipsk 5.86d | converts DVI into Postscript format |
| gsftopk 1.19.1 | rasterizes Type 1 fonts into PK fonts |
| HBF to GF | font format converter |
| Ispell | Spell checker with American, English, German and French dictionaries, to be used in conjunction with Emacs |
| lacheck | cheks your LaTeX files without actually compiling them |
| ltx2rtf 4.3 | converts LaTeX files to RTF files |
| makindexk 2.13 | processes index files |
| musixflx | helps writing music |
| odvipsk | converts Omega extended DVI files to Postscript |
| owindvi 0.67 | previews Omega extended DVI files |
| ps2pkm 1.5 | another rasterizer for Type 1 files |
| seetexk | various tools to manipulate DVI files |
| t1utils 1.11 | tools to assemble and disassemble Type 1 fonts |
| ttf2pfb, ttf2pk, ttfdump | a collection of tools to manipulate TTF fonts |
| tex4htk | converts TeX or LaTeX files to HTML |
| texinfo | the GNU technical documentation package relying on TeX |
| windvi 0.67 | previews DVI files |
| Other programs supplied | |
| psutils | a collection of tools to manipulate Postscript files |
| gzip, bzip2 | compressors with their DLLs |
| PNG tools | supplementary tools to handle PNG files |
| TIFF tools | supplementary tools to handle TIFF files |
| Jpeg to PS | converter from the JPEG format to Postscript |
| NetPBM | a collection of tools to handle, transform and convert graphic files of various format |
| TeXSetup | the setup program |
| EPS to PDF | converter using Ghostscript |
To be complete, you will find in annexe 11 the rough listing of the complete binary distribution.