TeXnicCenter & MiKTeX – “directory where the executable is located”?

Question

I have a 64-bit System running Windows 7. I installed MiKTeX and then tried to install the TeXnicCenter editor.

All went well until I clicked on the TeXnicCenter icon on my desktop and was asked

Enter the full path of the directory where the executable (latex, tex, etc) of your TeX-distribution is located

I answered C:\Program Files (x86)\TeXnicCenter - which is where the TeXnicCenter download went! But there is a problem - the error message is as follows:

The application 'LaTeX' has not been found in the directory of your TeX-distribution is located

Please enter the directory where the executiable files (tex.exe, latex.exe, etc) are located.

I am beginning to wonder if there is something else I should have downloaded other than the TeXnicCenter system?

Can anyone help?

Answer 1

MiKTeX and TeXnicCenter are two different things. The former is a distribution of TeX that includes a bunch of packages as well as the executables latex.exe, pdflatex.exe, tex.exe, etc. The latter is an editor that provides a front end to the distribution. You should point TeXnicCenter to where you installed MiKTeX, not TeXnicCenter itself.

On my machine, running TeXnicCenter on Windows 7 with TeX Live 2011 (yet another distribution of TeX), my setup looks like this:

These building profiles (I have a bunch of them, as you can see from the list on the left) are set up when you first start TeXnicCenter. The "Path to the (La)TeX compiler" is the location of latex.exe on your machine. Depending on where you installed MiKTeX, that's where latex.exe resides. I'm guessing it would be somewhere in:

C:\Program Files\MiKTeX\2.9\bin\

or

C:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX\2.9\bin\

depending on whether you installed a 64-bit version of 2.9.

---

Edit: I may be wrong in my path assumption above. @doncherry has pointed out that this may in fact be

C:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\bin\

Goes to show the installation structure of different installation may be noticeably different.

Answer 2

I agree with everything that Werner said except the path. I have the same setup as Peter (Win7 64bit), and my path is

C:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\bin

The output profile looks like this (I have several non-standard profiles as well):

So, quick overview:

MiKTeX, TeX Live = distributions of LaTeX, i.e. "the LaTeX system itself"

TeXnicCenter, TeXworks, ... = editors set up for LaTeX

You might have come across proTeXt as well; this is a bundle containing, among other things, a LaTeX distribution (MiKTeX) and a LaTeX editor (TeXnicCenter).