How to run AMS-Tex with MiKTex?

[TTL]

At the DOS prompt, I type amstex filename,
and an error message follows.

So what is the command for running AMS-Tex?
I can see latex, tex, bibtex commands, but not amstex command. Why?

Help!

[David Schumacher]

On Thu, 2 Sep 1999 00:16:03 -0400, "TTL" <tl...@gmu.edu> wrote:
>So what is the command for running AMS-Tex?
>I can see latex, tex, bibtex commands, but not amstex command. Why?

You could use:
\documentclass{amsart}

Documentation is located in \doc\latex\amslatex\

David

[Daniel Luecking]

uc...@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (David Schumacher) writes:

This is the means of running the LaTeX class amsart, not for the AMS-TeX
format (which is an add-on to plainTeX, not LaTeX).

Tim (Murphy) has often said that AMS-TeX is obsoleted by AMS-LaTeX, but
when I get math .tex files off the internet, they are roughly
evenly divided betwee LaTeX2e, LaTeX209, and AMS-TeX. With
plainTeX an additional small minority.

--
Dan Luecking Dept. of Mathematical Sciences
luec...@comp.uark.edu University of Arkansas
http://comp.uark.edu/~luecking/ Fayetteville, AR 72101

[Daniel Luecking]

"TTL" <tl...@gmu.edu> writes:

>At the DOS prompt, I type amstex filename,
>and an error message follows.

>So what is the command for running AMS-Tex?

>I can see latex, tex, bibtex commands, but not amstex command. Why?

1. Put
\input amstex
at the top of your file.tex and run plain TeX on it:
tex file

OR

2. Create an amstex format: write a file containing the following three
lines:
\input plain
\input asmtex
\dump
Name it amstex.ini (there may already be such a file on your system).
now run:
tex --ini amstex.ini
This creates a file named amstex.fmt in the current directory. Move it
to
\localtexmf\miktex\fmt
(or
\texmf\miktex\fmt
if you don't have a localtexmf tree).

Run (may not be necessary, but can't hurt):
initexmf -u

NOW you can run
tex &amstex file
to use the amstex format.

OR

3. There is a utility program called makefmt, but it will attempt to read
amstex.tex without first reading plain.tex, so it doesn't work as
straightforwardly as one might hope. But here is a another method:
create the _two_ line tex file (as above, but you can omit the \dump
line), but name it differently. Essentially any unique name with .tex
extension, say amst.tex then run
makefmt --dest-name amstex.fmt amst

NOW you can run tex &amstex ... as in the second method.

The only advantage of #3 over #2 is that makefmt takes care of the \dump
itself, moves amstex.fmt to the correct directory, arranges that
the filename database is updated and cleans up .log files.