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

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 11:09:09AM +0200, Denis Bitouzé wrote:
> 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.

I have spent considerable time on how to handle non-ascii directory
paths under Windows.

Maybe the principal problem is that the default 'codepage' of the
command-prompt is non-ascii. And if a script sets the codepage to
utf-8, then this setting will NOT be inherited by child processes.
And it requires administrative permissions to set the default
codepage to utf-8.

https://tug.org/texlive/windows.html#nonascii contains a few not
quite satisfactory workarounds.

Sorry.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg