Windows Installation

In order to be able to run ConTeXt under Windows, you will need the following:

• a stand-alone ConTeXt distribution or any other TeX distribution (such as MikTeX, TeX Live, ... )
• Perl, Ruby and GhostScript
• some text editor
• PDF viewer (Adobe Reader, GSview or any other)

Which ConTeXt distribution to choose?

You have to bear in mind that ConTeXt is being developed reasonably fast (see Release Notes), so it's recommended to update it regulary.

Stand-alone ConTeXt distribution

• http://www.pragma-ade.com/download-1.htm

Good reasons for choosing the stand-alone distribution are:

• you don't need LaTeX
• you always want to have the very latest ConTeXt distribution
• ... write some more

TODO: also installation instructions for stand-alone since it's not very intuitive; also explain how to choose which ConTeX to execute in case there is also MikTeX ot TeX Live installed; explain the best way for updating (See: To-Do List)

MikTeX

• http://www.miktex.org/

MikTeX is probably the easiest and most recommended solution for newbies or for those who have already been using LaTeX and don't want to install anything else. MikTeX is very user-friendly, updating is very easy.

However, some more experienced users may not always be happy with it:

• using fonts doesn't always work as expected (or at least different than in the stand-alone distribution)
• ConTeXt format is usually recent, but not always the latest
• it's difficult to change the source of ConTeXt core (for the sake of experimenting) and remake formats (if anyone doesn't agree here, please explain how you did it)

• Go to miktex options. select miktex TeX formats. choose any one format cont-nl, cont-uk, cont-de and cont-en. uncheck the exclude. press build. The format file will be generated and ready for compilation.

TODO: write which "packages" from MikTeX are needed to make ConTeXt work (See: To-Do List)

TeX Live

• http://www.tug.org/texlive/

TODO: can someone with any experience write something about it? (See: To-Do List)

Installing Perl and Ruby

• http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/
• http://www.ruby-lang.org/

You need the two scripting languages in other operating systems as well, but installing them under Windows may be a bit less intuitive for a newbie than under Linux.

You can download ActivePerl here and Ruby here.

After installing them (remember the folder where you've put them!) you have to check if both executables are included in the PATH. Open the command line (Start -> Run ... -> type cmd or command) and check if

perl --version

and

ruby --version

work OK.

If windows complains about "Command not found", go to the Control Panel -> System ... (Can please someone with English version of Windows write the exact procedure how to add ruby & perl to PATH variable?)

Installing GhostScript

• http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
• http://www.ghostscript.com/

If you already worked with (La)TeX before, you probably already have it installed. Try

gswin32 --version

You have to download GhostScript (filename gs851w32.exe or a similar one) and preferrably GSview as well (gsv47w32.exe or similar). Be sure to include the executables (folder where gswin32.exe is located) into the PATH variable.

Choosing a text editor & compiling

Winedt does a good job. By default it comes for Tex, LaTeX compilation. It can be used to configure for context. Winedt is not free software. It can be downloaded from http://www.winedt.com

You need to install winedt after the installtion of miktex, ghostscript and acroreader for windows.

Other useful software

Assuming that you already have Adobe Reader (if not, you can get it here; you don't need it to compile your documents, but at least to see the results), there is still some software still worth mentioning.

PStoEDIT

pstoedit for windows can be downloaded from http://www.pstoedit.net/pstoedit/

Only needed in order to be able to use some advanced features such as those mentioned in METAPOST outlines

See also ...

• LilyPond
• Font Tools
• ... ?