LaTeX

I wish for the LaTeX applications, dvi, !TeXFonts and !DVIview for my BeagleBoard and for my Raspberry_Pi.
Since we are hoping that the Raspberry-Pi will be successful in academia, it seems a reasonable wish. I haven’t tested it on either computer, but the present RISC OS version doesn’t run properly on an Iyonix and so it is unlikely to run on these newer computers. It probably needs a programmer to tweak the current versions to be ARMv7 safe for the BB and ARMvX (X=6? or X=5?) safe for the Raspberry-Pi.

(La)TeX is a whole pile of pain. I suspect the above frontend apps aren’t even 32 bit, though themselves they’re fairly small. The problem is the existing TeX distro itself is from 1992 or thereabouts, which is a tad old by modern standards: PDF hadn’t even been invented by then, so there’s no PDFTeX let alone modern things like XeTeX (uses Unicode and OpenType fonts – very pretty on a Mac with Apple’s fonts).

So the distro needs essentially starting from scratch again. I’ve looked at this several times (first in 2002, and then last year). It’s not fun. The way a distro like TeTeX or TeXLive! is built is extremely awkward to cross compile. The reason is that TeX is itself written in a language called Web. So the build first builds some libraries, then makes a Web2C compiler, then uses it to turn TeX into C, then compiles that C, and then uses the compiled binary to build the package files (styles, fonts, etc). When you cross compile you need two versions of everything – one for the build platform (eg Linux) and another for RISC OS, and of course a way of knowing which one to use at any given moment. This was painful, because TeTeX had no idea whatever of this problem.

I did a huge amount of hacking on TeTeX in 2002 trying to make it compile, and I didn’t get very far. I tried again last year, with only a tiny fraction of time. TeXLive! (the current mainstream TeX distro) is much much more friendly, but it wasn’t an out-of-the-box compile. It looked like it might have built with some work, but I didn’t have any more time to pursue it further.

Almost nobody uses DVI these days for new TeX output, everyone uses PDF. So a new TeX distro with a few frontends would probably satisfy most requirements without having to worry about DVIview and TeXFonts.

Thanks for the informative reply, so it’s more than a tweak, but it’s still a wish!