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

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2024-05-25 at 09:51:58 +0100, Jonathan Fine wrote:

 > I wonder, what does miktex do? Presumably they have the same
 > potential problems as texlive, and the same options for possible
 > solutions.
 >
 > When I supported miktex on Windows at my workplace, I don't recall
 > having any such installation problems. But then, all my usernames
 > were ascii.

Hi Jonathan,
let me answer your statements/questions in reverse order.

If all directory and file names are ASCII encoded TeX Live has no
problems as well, even on Windows.

I don't know what MiKTeX does because I have no access to a Windows
machine.  It would be helpful to know in which programming language
the MiKTeX installer is written.  I know that Christian Schenk is
quite familiar with C.

The problem is obviously the command-line interpreter.  Siep said that
its current encoding is not passed to child processes.

A program written in C should have full control.  At least it should
be possible to access the UTF-16LE filenames directly regardless of
the current CLI encoding.  But IMO it makes more sense to find out
first whether PowerShell is an option.

Regards,
  Reinhard

--
------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover                    mailto:reinhard.kotucha at gmx.de
------------------------------------------------------------------