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

[Denis Bitouzé]

Hi John,

Le 24/05/24 à 20h22, John Collins a écrit :

Sorry for the delay.

> Was the problem your student saw confined to how kpsewhich displayed
> the value of TEXMFHOME?  Or was there also a problem when she tried
> running a program like pdflatex, a problem such as pdflatex not
> finding files that are under TEXMFHOME?

Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly and the course is over. But,
IIRC, the two problems arose.

> I ask because I tried this myself in the following way:
>
> 1. I created a directory with a non-ASCII character in it, and changed TEXMFHOME
> to add that directory to the search path.
>
> 2. Just as your student found, kpsewhich displayed a strange value for the
> non-ASCII character.
>
> 3. I then put a file 'uuuu.tex' in the tex/latex subdirectory in the new TEXMF
> tree.
>
> 4. When I ran 'kpsewhich uuuu.tex', it reported successfully finding the file,
> but with the apparently wrong name for the directory.
>
> 5. I used pdflatex to compile a .tex file that had the line  \input{uuuu} in it.
> The file uuuu.tex was correctly read, and pdflatex reported the correct
> directory name.

IIRC, the problem was that a .bib file in the bibtex/bib subdirectory of
TEXMFHOME was not found.

> Further tests showed that kpsewhich appears to be coding its output in the
> system code page, which on my system (and probably a default Windows system in
> France) is CP1252.  Simply doing 'chcp 1252' resulted in a correct display from
> kpsewhich.

Ah, good to know!

> So I think the problem is a bug only in how kpsewhich displays its
> output.

OK.
-- 
Denis