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I have been a long user of TeXLive (TL) for many years on my Windows XP machine. I currently have TeXLive 2008 installed and I would like to install the new TL2010. I have heard of the possibility to have multiple TL installations on the same machine. I have three questions:

  1. Does anyone has experience with having multiple TL versions on a Windows machine? I don't see that my "environment variables" depend on TL files.

  2. Are there any additional thing that I should know about these multiple (or concurrent?) installations? I understand that I have to use different folder names for the different TL versions.

  3. I know that I have to indicate WinEdt which TL version to use. Anything else I should know here?

P.S: I would like to keep my old TL2008 as it has always worked very fine for me and in case I don't like TL2010 for some reason, I always have the TL2008 as reserve.

Thanks a lot...

yCalleecharan
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1 Answers1

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When you install TL 2010, the default installation location will contain 2010, so it will not overwrite your TL 2008 installation. The installer will adjust your PATH environment variable to insert the path to TL2010, before the path to TL2008, so TL2010 will be used by default. (Note that this doesn't work if you installed TL2008 as admin and TL2010 as user.)

Then all you need to do to switch between your TL installations is to adjust the PATH variable so that it mentions only TL2008, or mentions it before TL2010. Make sure the change is effective before you start WinEDT, and in its configuration, don't use the full path to TeX binaires, but only the name: pdflatex.exe as opposed to C:\texlive\2010\bin\win32\pdflatex.exe.

You can change the PATH locally in a console (cmd.exe window) by issuing PATH="C:\texlive\2008\bin\win32;%PATH%". Then everything started from this console will use TL2008. That way, you should even be able to start to instances of WinEDT, each using a different TL, at the same time.

mpg
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  • Thanks. Good to know about the path priority issue in Windows and the "shorthand" form for the executables in WinEdt. I don't use the console (cmd.exe) with WinEdt and so I'll make the change in the Windows environment variables menu. 1 vote up. – yCalleecharan Dec 04 '10 at 17:30