Section L.4 Installing Anaconda
Anaconda is a well-regulated development environment for Python under Windows, and I recommend it for users who do not already have Python installed. The essential
pretext script has github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext/pull/252 to support both Python 2 and Python 3. Therefore we make no recommendation about which Python version to choose.If you already have a working Python installation, skip to Section L.5.
You have some choice with your Anaconda installation. It actually supports the installation of several independent Pythons side-by-side (since both 2.7 and 3.x are in active use, this is more reasonable than it seems). If you do not need Python for anything else or are simply a minimalist, Miniconda is also an option. Miniconda installs no packages, but these can be installed via the
conda utility at the command line later.- Download either Miniconda, Python 2.7, or Python 3.5 from the
www.continuum.io/downloads. - Run the installer and accept all the default suggestions.
Congratulations, you have successfully installed Python.
If you do not care about images, you can stop here. Much of the PreTeXt functionality is already present. However, to use the
pretext/pretext script to create SVG images from sources like PDF/PNG images, Sage, Asymptote, or TikZ, you need to install ImageMagick using the directions in Section L.5.
