ConTeXt Standalone
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The ConTeXt Minimal is a complete, up-to-date ConTeXt distribution which can be upgraded efficiently. It can be used to install either the stable or the beta version of ConTeXt. It can also be used in parallel with existing TeX installtions such as MikTeX, TeXLive, or older minimal installation. It is aimed towards ConTeXt users, so it does not include LaTeX specific packages and binaries.
NOTE: ConTeXt develops at a fast pace, and sometimes beta releases have serious bugs. ConTeXt minimals allow you to test the latest ConTeXt release without having to worry if an upgrade will mess an critical project. You can have two (or multiple) parallel ConTeXt minimals, and freeze one for your critical projects, and use the other one for experimenting. |
Contents
General Information
Supported platforms
Platform | short name | Binarties from | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
Windows | mswin | Akira Kakuto (W32TeX) | |
Linux | linux | contextgarden.net | compiled with glibc 2.3.6 |
Linux, 64-bit | linux-64 | Peter Münster | Should be renamed to linux-amd64 |
Linux, PowerPC | linux-ppc | Piotr Kopszak | |
Mac OS X, Intel | osx-intel | Mojca Miklavec | |
Mac OS X, PowerPC | osx-ppc | Mojca Miklavec | |
Mac OS X, Universal Binaries | osx-universal | Mojca Miklavec | |
FreeBSD | freebsd | Yue Wang, Diego Depaoli | Should be renamed to freebsd-intel |
FreeBSD, AMD64 | freebsd-amd64 | Michael Krauß | |
Solaris, Intel | solaris-intel | Michael Krauß | |
Solaris, Sparc | solaris-sparc | Vladimir Volovich | compiled on solaris 8 |
We need volunteers for providing binaries for other platforms. If you want to support a platform, please write to ConTeXt Mailing Lists
Dependences
- Ruby 1.8
- Rsync (The windows binary of rsync are distributed with the minimals)
Disc space required
ConTeXt macro files are small (less than 10MB), but the minimals comes with various free fonts which considerable increase the size of the distribution to around 200MB).
Installation and use on Unix like platforms (Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris)
Installation
Select a folder where you want to install ConTeXt. For a single user installation, you can use your $HOME/context
directory. For a multi-user installation, in Linux you can use
/opt/code
; in Mac you can use .... Note that, at present, while using MKIV, you need to have write permissions in the installation directory. In order to install the minimals, ownload first-setup.sh, and place it in your installation directory. Then open a terminal, go to the installation directory, and run
sh ./first-setup.sh
This takes a long time, so go have a coffee.
Usage: permanent
(For those who mostly use ConTeXt and [almost] never LaTeX.)
Put the following line to ~/.bash_profile
or ~/.bashrc
:
source ~/context/tex/setuptex ~/context/tex
(t)csh users can use the variant:
source ~/context/tex/setuptex.csh
In theory it should already suffice to add export PATH=~/context/tex/texmf-<platform>/bin:$PATH
.
Usage: temporary
(For those who often use LaTeX, but need the latest ConTeXt every now and then.)
Just type
. ~/context/tex/setuptex ~/context/tex
to switch from system-wide TeX distribution to the minimals inside current shell.
Updating
For now just run ./first-setup.sh
again. This will change - the name is not most self-explanatory at the moment.
In theory
mtxrun --script update
should work, but it has not been tested yet.
Uninstalling
Just remove the folder (distribution did not touch anything else):
rm -rf ~/context
Remaking formats
Thi is optional: only if you need to remake formats for some unexpected reason or use another interface (for example the German one):
mktexlsr texexec --make --all en de texexec --make --xtx --all en de luatools --generate context --make en de
Installation and usage on Mac
TODO: Merge details from ConTeXt Minimals/Mac Installation (See: To-Do List) |
Installation and usage on Windows
Installation: global & GUI
(For those who don't need MikTeX/TeX Live and prefer Graphical user interface.)
Download and run the GUI installer (made by Vyatcheslav Yatskovsky).
Slides from author's presentation can be downloaded here.
Use standard windows tool for uninstalling the application.
Installation: local & command-line
(For those who need MikTeX/TeX Live and are comfortable with command-line.)
Download and unzip context-setup-mswin.zip
Run first-setup.bat
, go for a coffee.
Before being able to use ConTeXt you need to run setuptex.bat to initialize the environment. A simple way to do it is to create a file startcontext.bat
(use any name) somewhere in PATH and put this line into it
C:\Programs\context\tex\setuptex.bat C:\Programs\context\tex
Then, you can type startcontext
into CMD whenever you want to use ConTeXt Minimals instead of MikTeX.
Another method is to create a shortcut to cmd.exe and edit the command line to read
C:\WINDOWS\System32\cmd.exe /k C:\Programs\context\tex\setuptex.bat C:\Programs\context\tex
This starts up a new command shell with the environment pre-loaded.
For uninstalling just delete the folder with minimals.
Troubleshooting
- rsync sometimes has problems with paths with uppercase letters (like c:\Temp or c:\Documents and Settings). Installing into all-lowercase paths without spaces sometimes helps.
- If you're behind firewall and rsync times out you need to open port 873 for outgoing TCP connections.
Contents
The minimals contain:
- ConTeXt: current, beta + some older releases
- Fonts: most important TeX-aware ones
- Binaries: latest version of pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX, Metapost
- Formats (need to be generated by user) for
- ConTeXt, mptopdf and plain TeX for pdfTeX/XeTeX/LuaTeX
- metafun and plain for Metapost
See ConTeXt Minimals/Contents.
Configuration
What to install
- --platform=name-of-platform (see supported platforms; default: the one we are working on)
- --engines=list-of-engines (options: luatex, xetex, pdftex, all; default: all)
- --context=version (options: current, beta, alpha, yyyy.mm.dd; default: beta)
What to do
- --force (as opposed to --dryrun; do the real thing; this is needed) needs to be fixed
- --update (update minimal tree)
- --make (make formats and generate file databases)
- --state (update tree using saved state) needs to be implemented/fixed
- --keep (as apposed to --delete; don't delete unused or obsolete files) needs to be improved
Where to install
- --texroot=path (installation path; default: tex)
Rsync Server
(currently there's only one anyway)
- --server=repository-url (default:
rsync://contextgarden.net
) - --module=string (default: minimals)
- --rsync=name-of-rsync-binary (default: rsync) Why do we need this?
See also ConTeXt Minimals/Implementation. Catergory:Minimals