TEXMFHOME on Windows (for users with long names, diacritics or spaces in their names)

[Denis Bitouzé]

Hi,

this is a kind of a followup of:

  ┌────
  │ https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2023-April/049083.html
  └────

Recently, one of my students using Windows (11 I guess) couldn't use the
default TEXMFHOME as known by TL because her ⟨username⟩ (derived from
her first and last names) was long and contained diacritics plus
(perhaps harmless) spaces.

Indeed:

  ┌────
  │ kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFHOME 
  └────

returned a path of the form:

  ┌────
  │ C:/Users/⟨distorted username⟩/texmf
  └────

where ⟨distorted username⟩ was a version of her ⟨username⟩ both
truncated and where diacritics were replaced by strange characters (and
perhaps, I don't remember exactly, spaces were dropped).

As a workaround, we created another auxtree directly at the root of C:.

But I wonder if such a case (quite common in France) couldn't be handled
by TL, which would save end-users having to resort to such workarounds.

Thanks.
-- 
Denis