Re: lilypond does a bit better

[Mats Bengtsson]

> > It seems to me,
> > that LilyPond is running fine. Nevertheless,  the same errors occur when
> > invoking latex. No matter how many times I run ly2dvi, the same messages
> > appear. They are listed below. Do you have any clue? perhaps you need to
> > know that I have already latex running on my PC. It is stored in
> > c:\tex\bin\win32 etcetera. This latex program is used by me as the
> > text-editor for my job.
> 
> Ah, then that's where the problem is.  This could get a little bit
> tricky.  What kind of TeX and version are you using?
> 
> > error: latex: command exited with value 256
> 
> LaTeX gets invoked by ly2dvi, through a wrapper script:
> 
>    /usr/lilypond/wrappers/latex
> 
> This script changes some environment variables (where to find the
> fonts, font sources, font metrics) from POSIX to DOS-style.
> 
> There could be, and probably are, two problems: the latex command is
> not in your $PATH, or the fonts cannot be found.
> 
> So, make sure that latex.exe is in your $PATH:
> 
>     $ echo $PATH   # show the path
>     $ PATH="$PATH:/cygdrive/c/tex/bin/win32"  # append latex.exe dir to path
>     $ latex.exe --version   # try if latex is there; don't forget .exe
> 
> but make sure /usr/lilypond/wrappers is earlier in the path.

I've used a separately installed MiKTeX version together with 
Lilypond and it's never been necessary to fiddle with the
PATH variable. The file /etc/profile.d/lily-miktex.sh finds
the path to MiKTeX from the registry and adds it automatically
to the PATH variable. If you have some other TeX distribution
or a MiKTeX version where this solution doesn't work, it would
be great if you could modify lily-miktex.sh and send the solution
to the list.

> Also, you should setup the texmf tree so that it matches the
> environment variables.  Do something like:
> 
>     $ rm -rf /usr/share/texmf   # remove partial texmf tree
>     $ ln -s /cygdrive/c/tex/texmf /usr/share/texmf   # create symlink

Again, this should not be necessary. In fact, it may cause 
problems since lilypond cannot calculate the length of text
strings from the .afm files of certain fonts that are included
in MiKTeX but not in teTeX. 

> If you're not short on diskspace, and have a good internet connection,
> you may want to try the experimental tetex/texmf packages from:
> 
>     http://lilypond.org/gnu-windows/testing/setup.exe
> 
> It's using a fully cygwin based tex setup, which is more robust for
> use with this cygwin based LilyPond; but you may experience other
> problems.

Agreed! MiKTeX causes some troubles and the current tricks
to work around these are not fully satisfactory.

   /Mats