On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 10:43:27AM +0200, Andreas Karlsson wrote: > > Considering the difficulties to install latex2rtf and get it to > work from inside LyX (see below), wouldn't it be a good idea to > handle latex2rtf like e.g. the Aspell dictionaries, i.e. > automatically download, install and configure it during the > installation process, if the user selects this option?
As I already wrote to the users' list, the problem reported by Dave is due to the fact that the latex2rtf option for specifying the config directory is broken on Windows. On Windows, latex2rtf is compiled with the hardcoded path "C:/l2r/cfg" for the config directory. However, the installer offers by default to install the program in "C:/Program Files/latex2rtf" (sic!). There are two ways for specifying the config directory, the first one is using the -P flag but it is broken (more below), the second one is using the env variable RTFPATH and this method works. Thus, an easy workaround is creating a latex2rtf.bat files containing: @echo off set RTFPATH=C:/Program Files/latex2rtf/cfg latex2rt %* and putting it in the PATH. If the configure.py script was not braindead, one would simply need to reconfigure LyX and voilà, latex2rtf would work. This is because configure.py checks first for latex2rtf and then for latex2rt (this is the name of the executable on Windows). However, configure.py does not check for the existence of an executable whose name is "program" but for files in the PATH whose name is either "program" or "program.exe". On Windows, you can invoke "program" and an executable whose name is "program" and whose extension is contained in the PATHEXT env variable gets executed. On a stock Windows installation, this is the content of PATHEXT: C:\> echo %PATHEXT% .COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.MSC Due to the aforementioned braindeadness, one needs changing in the preferences the name of the latex2rtf executable from "latex2rt" to "latex2rtf" in order to be able to use the batch file. Another option is using a workaround for the broken -P option. If one specifies -P "C:/Program Files/latex2rtf/cfg", the path is not taken into account because the check to assure that it is an absolute path fails due to the fact that only *nix paths are considered. However, if LyX and latex2rtf are both installed on the same drive, one can instead use -P "/Program Files/latex2rtf/cfg" and this works. So, the other option is simply adding the above flag to the converter command in preferences. In conclusion, both configure.py (IMO) and latex2rtf need to be fixed. Doing that, using latex2rtf on Windows will be quite simple. -- Enrico
