Portable Latex

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LaTeX is great, but its installation procedure can be painstaking. 
This is a LaTeX repackaging which doesn't need any installation, you just run ^[1] it from anywhere: a usb pen, a cd, or any location on your hard drive that you decide, so as to keep your operating system untouched.

This is usually referred to as "portability"^[2] , and is accomplished here in different ways according to the user's operating system: check the following table.

What's more, I took the occasion to insert in the package a thoughtfully selected suite of applications to make it a full editing/compiling/viewing environment. On the way, it turned out into a full-fledged distro project to which dedicate oneself, so any feedback is welcome: please refer to my home page for contacts.

anyone!	Slax LiveCD	Just insert the CD in your machine and use it. As soon as the CD is removed, your machine will forget everything and will be reverted back exactly to the state it was before.
	Tgz portable package	Just extract the package anywhere and use it. Again, your system will be kept substantially unaltered. DISCONTINUED, use tl-portable, provided by TeX Live DVD since 2008 release; it basically does the same thing. The present implementation is still available for those looking for lightness at the expenses of freshness.
	WinDOS portable package	ABANDONED, use tl-portable.bat inside TeX Live DVD

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to Andrea Ferretti for prompt and thorough feedback, and for taking it seriously enough to start a competing project, employing different technologies and named ReadyLatex.

• I found out there was indeed a seemingly discontinued project quite similar to mine, I hope to survive them for some time, although supported by a definitely uglier homepage :)