ReTextPortable

This repository contains configuration files for creating a PortableApps version of ReText for Windows.

Following the steps in this document you can get ReText up and running on your machine and optionally create an installer that you can easily take with you.

Creating a PortableApps version of ReText

1. Get the ReTextPortable files from github.com and put them in a directory called ReTextPortable

2. Install the portableapps.com launcher from portableapps.com

3. Install NSIS Portable (unicode version) in a sibling directory of the PortableApps.com Launcher as NSISPortable

4. Extract the 64-bit Windows embeddable package from python.org into ReTextPortable\App\python

5. Edit the file named similarly to python312._pth and uncomment the line import site

6. Download get-pip.py into ReTextPortable\App\python

7. From a command prompt go to the python directory and run get-pip:

    cd ReTextPortable\App\python
    python get-pip.py
   

8. In the same command window install retext and all its dependencies using pip:

    python -m pip install retext
    python -m pip install PyQt6-WebEngine
   

9. Run the portable apps launcher generator on the ReTextPortable directory to create ReTextPortable.exe

10. Run ReTextPortable.exe to start ReText

Using the latest versions from github

In order to create an installer with the latest version of ReText from git, replace step 8 in the description above with the following:

8. a. Go to https://github.com/retext-project/retext, click the green Code button and click Download ZIP

   b. Extract the zip file to the directory above RetextPortable. A directory retext-master will be created next to the ReTextPortable directory

   c. In the same command window used in step 7 install retext and all its dependencies:

   python -m pip install ..\..\..\retext-master
   python get-icons.py
   python -m pip install PyQt6-WebEngine
   

Creating an installer for ReTextPortable

If you want you can also package the application created in the previous section in a single executable.

1. Install the portableapps.com installer from portableapps.com
2. Adapt the version numbers in ReTextPortable\App\AppInfo\appinfo.ini to match the version of ReText you are packaging
3. Run the portable apps installer generator on the ReTextPortable directory to create ReTextPortable_<version>.paf.exe, which will be stored next to the ReTextPortable directory.