Re: CrossTeX

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Robert Burgess <burgess@systems.cs.cornell.edu> wrote:

>> You've read and followed the TeX Policy which is in the
>> tex-common package?
>>   
> I hadn't, but just took a look at it; thank you for pointing it out so
> that I can be sure I follow it.  I guess what confuses me the most is
> that CrossTeX is written in Python, and all of the information I can
> find assumes that everything about TeX is either in TeX macros itself
> or possibly C---what do I need to do about my Python library and
> script placement?

For script placement, there are two possibilities. Upstream places
scripts in $TEXMFDIST/scripts/$origin/{,$language/}, with symlinks in
an appropriate directory in the path pointing to them. For your
situation, I'd just place the script in the path.

As for the library integration - a TeX application is expected to find
files in a TEXMF tree according to their type. Either their are Python
bindings for libkpathsea (but I'm not aware of a libkpathsea-python or
however it would be called), then you should just "link" against that,
and be done. Otherwise, one would probably need to use 'shell escapes'
and use kpsewhich's output.  

I don't know what CrossTeX does, but I also don't expect that you need
to do much special tweaking as a Debian maintainer.

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)