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

[David Carlisle]

On Fri, 24 May 2024 at 10:09, Denis Bitouzé <denis.bitouze at univ-littoral.fr>
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.
>
> Thanks.
> --
> Denis
>
> Rather than make a new tree, the user could presumably have a texmf.cnf
that sets TEXMFHOME
using whatever 8+3 name is listed by
dir /X c:\users
so something like

c:\users\DAV~1\texmf

(TEXMFVAR and TEXMFCONFIG also have default settings based on ~)
You probably don't want to change %USERPROFILE% in the environment but
changing those three in texmf.cnf should be safe enough, I think.

David
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