[R] TeX distribution on Windows

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 9/5/05, Göran Broström <gb at stat.umu.se> wrote:
> I'm looking for a Windows distribution of TeX that works with  R, after a
> few years' absence from Windows. On Duncan Murdoch's Rtools page fptex is
> still recommended, but it turns out that fptex is "defunct" as of May 2005,
> see
> 
> http://www.metz.supelec.fr/~popineau/xemtex-7.html
> 
> So, what is suggested? TUG (tug.org) recommends something called proTeXt,
> which is said to be "based on MiKTeX", for Windows users. Since MikTeX
> could be used with  R, that sounds like a good alternative.
> 
> Any comments to that?
> 
> --
> Göran Broström                    tel: +46 90 786 5223
> Department of Statistics          fax: +46 90 786 6614
> Umeå University                   http://www.stat.umu.se/~goran.brostrom/
> SE-90187 Umeå, Sweden             e-mail: gb at stat.umu.se
> 
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As others have commented MiKTeX works with R.  Duncan Murdoch's
site mentions some ways to circumvent its one limitation.  This is
automated in the miktex-update.bat file in 

http://cran.r-project.org/contrib/extra/batchfiles/

for Windows XP systems.  It will locate the current version of R on
your system using
the registry and then copy the appropriate .fd and .sty files from your R 
distribution to the appropriate MiKTeX directory.   Assuming R and MiKTeX
are installed, just issue this command without arguments:

   miktex-refresh

at the Windows console.  Using that command, all you have to do is install
MiKTeX without any customizations and then run the above command to
copy the mentioned files from R to MiKTeX.

(If any of the TeX files in the R distribution change then you should rerun
the above command after each install of R.  If they have not changed
you can run it or not, it does not matter.)

Also in batchfiles, is the following Windows XP command:

   Rfind

which when issued without arguments will list the location on your system of a 
number of programs used with R including MiKTeX.   It does not actually
modify any environment variables or any other aspect of your system.