Cygwin w/ TeXnicCenter or WinEdt - Can they be sewn/integrated to work together

Question

Is is possible to connect one of either WinEdt or TeXnicCenter (Windows variant) such that it uses a TeTeX distribution of LaTeX that is included from a Cygwin distribution? I simply cannot use MiKTeX because my bash-specific scripts called from the top level of my latex source using an \immediate\write18 command will not work using MS-DO(rk)S.

Ideally, what I would like to do is get WinEdt or TeXnicCenter to open a cygwin window and run pdflatex on the master source file everytime I want to compile. Any ideas? I typically use TextEdit on a Mac which makes it relatively easy for a user, so I'm not very well versed in changing these config options in Windows.

Answer 1

OK. So I spent the last five days figuring this out. I was having severe problems because the command line switch for PDFLATEX was not specified (pdflatex is a symbolic link to pdfetex)

1. Install Cygwin and your packages
2. Do not install MiKTeX
3. Add the C:\cygdrive\bin to the path
4. Install WinEdt
5. Set the Execution mode for pdflatex to run the binary 'pdfetex -efmt=pdflatex' (the last bit is CRITICAL for pdflatex to work correctly)

It seems to work ok now.

I expect that you could do something similar with MiKTeX, but like I said, I ABSOLUTELY needed seamless bash integration, so the Cygwin distribution of TeTeX was a better choice for me (unless I find otherwise).