That’s all fine when it works, but I’ve recently had a bit of trouble making zips at my end. My favoured tool for doing that has tended to be 7-Zip. However, it was pointed out to me last week that the resulting zip files are not quite right. On Unix systems, the command unzip -xa will convert line endings to the system convention (LF only), even if they come from Windows (LF-CR endings). However, this requires that the zip identifies text files, and 7-Zip marks everything as binary!

I did a bit of hunting around, and found Info-ZIP, where after a bit of hunting about you can find zip and unzip binaries for Windows. These give me Unix-like capabilities on Windows, so I can make the appropriate files, alter line endings on zipping/unzipping and check the results.

That led me to take another look at the batch file I use each time I release something to CTAN: doing it by hand is an unreliable business! I’ve reworked it quite a bit, to generalise everything and also add a few tweaks. For anyone interested, the file is available here. It’s called make, so that you get Unix-like abilities on Windows. The file has to be customised for each package I write, but most of this version is generalised, and can be altered using a few settings.

set AUXFILES=aux cmds dvi glo gls hd idx ilg ind ist log los out tmp toc
set CLEAN=bib bst cls eps gz ins cfg pdf sty tex txt zip
set DOCEXTRA=\AtBeginDocument{\OnlyDescription}
set INDEXFILE=gglo
set PACKAGE=achemso
set PDF=%PACKAGE%
set TDSROOT=latex\%PACKAGE%
set TEX=achemso-demo
set TXT=README
set UNPACK=%PACKAGE%.dtx

Anyone at all familiar with batch files will see that this is a block of environmental variables: in this case, these are the settings for my achemso package. Most are pretty obvious settings, but in case anyone wants to use the file for their own purposes:

• AUXFILES File types to delete after every run: throw away files.
• CLEAN File types deleted only if make clean is run: useful stuff.
• DOCEXTRA Inserted when creating documentation, can be anything. I don’t typeset the code for my packages in the release documents, hence the \OnlyDescription setting.
• INDEXFILE This is always gglo for documents using the ltxdoc class, but is l3doc if using the LaTeX3 class l3doc.
• PACKAGE Pretty obvious, the bundle name!
• PDF The names of PDF files to add to the documentation part of a TDS zip. By having this as a setting, special effects (demo documents, for example) are possible.
• TDSROOT. Almost always as given for a LaTeX package.
• TEX A list of .tex files to copy into the TDS archive: to avoid any testing files, not all .tex files are copied.
• TXT The names of text files to copy to the documentation directory
• UNPACK The file(s) to run to unpack the package. I use .dtx files that are self-extracting, but the traditional method is to have a separate .ins file.

If the batch file proves useful to enough people, I might write some proper documentation and do a bit more generalisation.

With all of that in place, I can hopefully keep Unix-based LaTeX users happy without too much work!