[tug-summer-of-code] Idea for GSoC

[Mario Rodas]

Hello everyone:

I am a Peruvian student (who loves LaTeX), and I have an idea to develop in
GSoC, I do not know if it will be good, so I hope your suggestions, Thanks.

My idea is to allow run LaTeX on external memory devices. For example for
people who travel a lot, or for which they were not allowed to install
software on their PCs to work, and want to use LaTeX, no problem.

Basically, for a good editing LaTeX documents, I guess it would be like
this:
MiKTeX + Ghostscript + Vim (with LaTeX plugin)

I hope your suggestions, greetings.
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[Jonathan Fine]

Hello Mario

Post by Mario Rodas
I am a Peruvian student (who loves LaTeX), and I have an idea to develop
in GSoC, I do not know if it will be good, so I hope your suggestions,
Thanks.
My idea is to allow run LaTeX on external memory devices. For example
for people who travel a lot, or for which they were not allowed to
install software on their PCs to work, and want to use LaTeX, no problem.
Basically, for a good editing LaTeX documents, I guess it would be like
MiKTeX + Ghostscript + Vim (with LaTeX plugin)

I'd certainly welcome something like this. There's already work in the
area. I've done a quick search for 'MikTeX USB" and come up with
<http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/MiKTeX+Ghostscript+GSview+USB-drive-HOWTO.txt>

I think it would be very helpful if you were able to spend an hour or
two looking for URL and posting to here a list of what you find and a
brief summary of what's in them.

Another approach is to provide TeX as a web service.

[Will Robertson]

Post by Jonathan Fine
Another approach is to provide TeX as a web service.

This actually works much better than I would have expected :)
"pdflatex-remote" is a PHP script that sends your LaTeX file to a
server which typesets it (resolving cross references, etc.) and sends
the PDF back to you:
<http://typeset.freisatz.de/>

Makes a good alternative for TeX editors when no distribution is yet
installed. But I don't think the project has been widely seen yet...

Will

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[Karl Berry]

My idea is to allow run LaTeX on external memory devices.

Thanks for the idea, but I think it's basically done. In addition to
what's been said here already, TeX Live includes a tl-portable script;
you can do an installation to a stick (of whatever size, doesn't have to
be the full thing) and then use tl-portable to access it, without having
to have any access to the host system's hard disks. This was the best
approach we could devise ...

Best,
Karl