2.4 Testing the installation

A valuable tool to test the installation now is the program kpsewhich.

As a first step, you should check if Web2C correctly identifies the location of your texmf tree. Open a command prompt window and type


kpsewhich -expand-path=$TEXMF

The answer should be the location of your texmf tree (e.g. c:/TeX/texmf if you unpacked the archive files as in the example above–note that the answer is a Unix style path, i.e. the DOS style \\ is substituted by /; you don't have to worry about this). If you don't get the right answer you have propably changed the default directory structure. In this case you have to set the variable TEXMF manually to the root directory of your texmf tree.

Given a root directory prefix (c:/TeX was my compile-time default), we have default locations as follows:


  <prefix>/         installation root (c:/TeX , compile-time default)
  . bin/win32       executables
  . man/            man pages
  . info/           info files
  . lib/            libraries (kpathsea.*)
  . texmf/          TDS root
  . . web2c/        implementation-dependent files
                    (.pool, .fmt, texmf.cnf, etc.)

This layout is identical to the standard one for teTEX under Unix and follows the TDS specification.

If you want to be on the safe side, you may type in mktexlsr to update the ls-R database, even if a proper ls-R file should be provided after unpacking the archive files.

You can always check if kpathsea finds a specific file by typing

 kpsewhich <filename>
A typical example would be
 d:\>kpsewhich cmr10.mf
 d:\>c:/TeX/texmf/fonts/source/public/cm/cmr10.mf