LyX ⇒ Portable LyX that runs with portable MikTeX?

[mark.farnell]

I have a friend who needs to write her thesis. She is not good at computer, therefore asking her to learn LaTeX is out of question. She does not have reliable access to internet and she often works on public computers installed with Windows, which she does *not* have admin access.

I have downloaded and tried the portable MikTeX on a USB stick and it works perfectly. However are there any portable LyX for Windows that does not require installation and designed to work with portable MikTeX?

Thanks!

Mark

[meho_r]

I don't think there's a portable version of LyX (take a look here). But, can't you just install it on the USB stick and use it from there? If portable MikTeX does have a folder containing all binary files, I expect you shouldn't have problems getting it to work: Tools > Preferences > PATH Prefix; here you should set the path to the binaries (note that, since on different machines drive letters may be different too, they may have to be corrected for every machine). And don't forget to reconfigure LyX after settings the path (Tools > Reconfigure).

EDIT: Did you check this out?

[opastopa]

(Windows XP) I've managed to make LyX portable and run on USB drive (whatever drive letter it happens to be assigned) as follows:

1) Download Miktex portable (http://miktex.org/portable/about) and unpack it to USB drive
2) copy entire lyx directory (from c:\program files\... ) to USB drive
3) edit the lyxrc.dist on USB drive (it's in LyX_directory_name/resources/) to reflect the position of miktex and other stuff. E.g., in my case I had to change the first line from

\path_prefix "C:\Program Files\LyX16\bin;C:\Program Files\LyX16\python;C:\Program Files\LyX16\imagemagick;C:\Program Files\LyX16\ghostscript;C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.8\miktex\bin"
to:
\path_prefix "..\bin;..\python;..\imagemagick;..\ghostscript;..\..\miktexportable\miktex\bin"

run USB_drive_letter:\LyX_directory_name\bin\lyx.exe

[songpants]

@opastopa: thanks for that great post!

I followed your instructions trying LyX versions 1.6.8, 1.6.9, 2.0 RC 3 with MiKTeX portable 2.9 and ran miktex-portable.cmd prior to launching any LyX exes.

The thing is, it all works fine as long as there still is a local "regular" MiKTeX distribution installed on C:\Programm Files but LyX complains about missing TeX files as soon as I remove that local distributions and try to have LyX depend on the portable MiKTeX distribution.

Do you have any clue, why LyX is not recognizing the portable MikTeX distribution (it is constantly reconfiguring itself whenever I start it)? Are there maybe some local files that are created by local MiKTeX distributions which LyX expects and which have no equivalents in the portable distribution? Or am I missing something regarding MiKTeX portable (i.e. MiKTeX Options > Roots: do I need to specify the path to the portable distribution)?

Thanks for any hints whatsoever,
Janko

[brokenclock]

Hi,

I've recently published Portable Lyx 2.0 on http://portable-lyx.impossible-exil.info. You may want to give it a try.

Best regards,

BrokenClock