Where should I install Emacs on Windows 7 as a standard account without admin priviliges for LaTeX pdf output?

Question

I've been able to get Emacs running by putting it in the /Temp directory, but I'd like to be able to export my Org files to Latex pdfs, and I haven't been able to work that out yet, (I don't have problems doing that with Ubuntu at home but perhaps I installed something else as a dependency, I'm not sure since I haven't got it in front of me). I noticed that the meta key seemed to be broken with emacs in my user directory. I wonder if there are issues because of the location of my emacs directory, and if there's a standalone LaTeX distribution that can easily interface with emacs.

So to sum up:

Is my emacs directory (currently in /Temp) in the correct location for a standard account? As a follow-on, where should I install/setup LaTeX/MiKTeX/otherTeX?

Answer 1

The way I do it is to set a system environment variable HOME to %USERPROFILE%

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Windows-HOME.html

See http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000549.htm for instructions on doing this.

This ends up setting your home directory for emacs to something like c:\Users\yourusername

In terms of setting up the pasths for TeX and co, you need to make sure the path emacs sees includes the path to those files. It depends on how you have them installed but a rough guide would be in emacs something like:

 (setenv "PATH" (concat "c:/cygwin/bin;" (getenv "PATH")))