|  |  | 9.7 Ipe on a USB-stick

## 9.7 Ipe on a USB-stick

Ipe for Windows is entirely self-contained—you can unzip the package anywhere, including on a USB-stick, and run Ipe from there. However, Ipe needs access to a LaTeX installation. One option is to use LaTeX online—you can enable this from the Help menu.

The other option is to install LaTeX as a portable installation on the same USB-stick:

- You can use the MiKTeX portable edition.
- The alternative is to use texlive. Download install-tl-windows.exe and run it, selecting the option for Custom install. When the full installer starts, change Portable setup to Yes, and change the TEXDIR directory to X:\texlive, where X is the drive letter of the USB-stick. You can also decrease the size of your installation by unselecting unnecessary packages and languages.

Installing LaTeX on the USB-stick will take quite a while. When it is done, unzip the Ipe package for Windows onto the root of the USB-stick. You should have the Ipe binary in X:\ipe-7.x.y\bin\ipe.exe.

Now create a directory X:\latexrun (it will be used by Ipe to run Latex).

Finally, you need to create a small configuration file as X:\ipe-7.x.y\ipe.conf. The contents of the file should be (for MiKTeX):

    IPELATEXPATH=ipe:\miktex-portable\texmfs\install\miktex\bin\x64
    IPELATEXDIR=ipe:\latexrun

of (for texlive):

    IPELATEXPATH=ipe:\texlive\bin\win32
    IPELATEXDIR=ipe:\latexrun

The `ipe:` part is translated by Ipe into the drive letter for the drive that Ipe is executed from, so it will correctly point to your USB-stick.

Double-check the setting for the IPELATEXPATH—it should be the directory that contains the pdflatex.exe program. Open Ipe and look at Show configuration from the Help menu, and check that all settings are correct.

It should now work to run Ipe from the USB-stick, whenever you plug it into a Windows computer.

If you want to make further customization settings, you can use the variable `config.ipedir` in your Lua code to refer to the USB-stick drive.