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

[Denis Bitouzé]

Hi Reinhard,

Le 25/05/24 à 04h25, Reinhard Kotucha a écrit :

> On 2024-05-24 at 22:48:34 +0200, Denis Bitouzé wrote:
>
>  > Couldn't Powershell be useful here?
>
> this is a good point.  But I must admit that I don't have access to
> a Windows machine, hence I can't try anything myself.

I'm in the same situation as you :)

> You have to distinguish between "Windows PowerShell" (powershell.exe),
> which is part of any Windows installation, and "PowerShell"
> (pwsh.exe).  AFAIK the latter must be downloaded and installed
> explicitly.
>
> The difference is that powershell.exe uses UTF16LE by default (this is
> how filenames are encoded internally on Windows) and that pwsh.exe
> uses UTF-8 by default.

Good to know.

> If the batch file invoking the Perl script is replaced with a pwsh
> script I suppose that things behave as on Unix.  The drawback is that
> users have to download and install external software.

Could it be provided by TL (no idea whether it makes sense or not:
license? size? etc.)?

> When using "Windows PowerShell" (powershell.exe) it should be possible
> to switch from UTF-16LE to UTF-8 within the script but in this case
> UTF-8 sequences are preceded by a Byte Order Mark (BOM) which can
> cause trouble.

Sigh...

> On the other hand, if it's possible to tell cmd.exe to use UTF-8 and
> the installer works as expected with non-ASCII characters in
> file/directory names, I assume that the UTF-8 BOM doesn't hurt because
> it's certainly present.

OK.

> The BOM is necessary for UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings because
> characters are stored as binary numbers where the byte order matters.
> Characters in UTF-8 are encoded as sequences of bytes and thus don't
> need a BOM.

OK.

> On 2024-05-24 at 21:57:04 +0200, Siep Kroonenberg via tex-live wrote:
>
>  > And if a script sets the codepage to utf-8, then this setting will
>  > NOT be inherited by child processes.
>
> I don't think that this is the case with PowerShell.  There is a
> variable called $OutputEncoding.  The name wouldn't make sense if the
> specified encoding is only used internally and not by child processes.
>
> If the sole problem is that forcing cmd.exe to use UTF-8 requires
> admin permissions I believe that it's worthwhile to keep an eye on
> PowerShell which uses Unicode by default.

+1

Regards.
-- 
Denis