Running Mark IV
Introduction
ConTeXt Mark IV does not use the kpathsea library to find files and configuration settings. It follows that running mktexlsr or fmtutil has no effect. This page explains the details of setting up and maintaining Mark IV.
The most important motivation for this page is that the TeX Live 2008 edition contains Mark IV, but it is only copied to the installed system, no post-install setup takes place at all. For this Tex Live release, the post-install setup has to be done manually. TeX Live 2009 does not
come with a usable Mark IV at all because the luatex on the 2009 editions is too old. Instructions on how to deal with TeX Live 2009 will be added soon. TeX Live 2010 has a working Context Mark IV out of the box: you can just run 'context' directly. At most, you could run luatools --generate; context --make
to deal with any tlmgr updates you may have performed since installing TeX Live.
If you have trouble following these instructions, please direct you questions or complaints on the ntg-context mailing list, not the tex-live list.
Special notes:
- Windows: Running Mark IV under Windows is the same as on Unix, but see below for a installation hints for the 'spaces in names' problem that seem to affect Windows users more often than other platforms.
- MacTeX: You need to update ConTeXt first.
- Debian: Mark IV suggests the tex-gyre package (TeX Gyre), not distributed currently under Debian due to licensing issues (see Debian installation )
Quickstart
Just for the extremely impatient unix user that knows how to deal with a web2c-based TeX distribution and has a simple, private (single-user) installation, this is the only absolutely required extra knowledge:
luatools --generate
is the Mark IV replacement for mktexlsr.
context --make
is the Mark IV replacement for fmtutil.
context myfile.tex
typesets a file.
Everybody else should read on.
A note for windows users: the luatex executable doest not accept filenames with spaces in their name. This means that if you are on windows you will at least have to set up a texmfcnf.lua as explained below, and you likely will even have to reinstall texlive, because the default texlive installation directory itself contains spaces. Details.
Generating and updating formats
Before first use and after each update to either the context distribution or the luatex executable you will have to regenerate the formats. The command for that is:
context --make cont-en
This will generate a new Mark IV format with the English interface. Without an explicit format argument, it will generate four formats: Mark IV cont-en, Matk IV cont-nl, luatex+mptopdf, and luatex+plain.
The generated formats are stored inside the texmf cache.
Using fonts
The OSFONTDIR
environment variable should contain the paths where the system fonts must be looked for.
Downloaded files
If you have the program 'curl' installed, then your input file can contain e.g.
\externalfigure [http://www.pragma-ade.com/show-gra.pdf]
and the referenced file will be downloaded automatically and placed in the 'texmf cache' if is not found in the cache already.
In case of trouble
File not found
- You may get errors like
I can't find file `C:/Program.tex'.
This is likely caused by the luatex executable not handling filename quoting properly yet. If filenames with spaces work at all, you are just lucky.
This problem is most likely to happen on Windows. There two steps to deal with it:
- You must put the main texmf tree in path without spaces. If you're installing Mark IV via TeXLive 2008, then simply change the top installation path at install time.
- If you're running XP or Server 2003 (and not Vista or Server 2008), you must also set the TeX user home and the Lua cache to paths without spaces.
C:/tlhome
is a good candidate.- In
texmf.cnf
set HOMETEXMF toC:/tlhome/$USERNAME
or to something similar of your liking. Using $USERNAME in the path will still give a per-user directory, just not under "Documents and Settings". This assumes that the user name doesn't have spaces of course... - As mentioned above, create/edit
texmfcnf.lua
and put a line likereturn { TEXMFCACHE = 'C:/tlhome/$USERNAME/.texlive2008/texmf-var' }
, which sets each user's cache inside his space-free TeX home path.
- In
Cache internals
(this paragraph is for developers and power-users only)
If you look at the folder that TEXMFCACHE points to, you will see a folder named luatex-cache. Inside that, there is the folder context. Inside the context folder, there usually is a single subfolder with a hexadecimal name. This is the md5sum of the name of the 'tex root' folder (aka SELFAUTOPARENT). Below this, there are currently four folders:
- curl contains downloaded files. The url is converted to something that can be represented on disk by replacing problematic characters by dashes
- fonts contains the file data/names.tma, this is the 'font name database' (and the derived names.tmc, tmc files are byte-compiled lua code for faster loading). There are also subdirectories containing the preprocessed metrics for non-tex fonts, one folder for each font type.
- formats contains the Mark IV format file
- trees has a small set of files with hexadecimal names, one for each of the top-level constituents of TEXMF (containing the filename database for that tree), and one for each of the found texmf.cnf files (containing in preprocessed form all the variables defined by that file). The filenames are md5sums of the contained directory or filename.