TeX, LaTeX and Friends

7:16 AM

@DavidCarlisle Yes: I'll probably not worry about it, but it does impact on e.g. HTML conversion ...

TeXnician

8:37 AM

@CarLaTeX Except the comma unfortunately...

One of the more surprising stories of the past year was Microsoft's announcement that it was going to use the Git version control system for Windows development. Microsoft had to modify Git to handle the demands of Windows development but said that it wanted to get these modifications accepted upstream and integrated into the standard Git client.

That plan appears to be going well. Yesterday, the company announced that GitHub was adopting its modifications and that the two would be working together to bring suitable clients to macOS and Linux.

@PauloCereda Oooh

@PauloCereda Source?

@PauloCereda Sounds like they have all the source in one massive repo, which is not how Git or other DCVS work best

@JosephWright arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/…

CarLaTeX

8:55 AM

@TeXnician Don't care about details :)

@DavidCarlisle I see Javier has got Git working

9:11 AM

@JosephWright ooh

The Amazon guy

Oh it's the last name

9:47 AM

@PauloCereda Seems they agree with us :)

@PauloCereda I did say to people some time ago (re. Git vs Mercurial vs ...) that Git had 'won' on a social basis :)

10:18 AM

Will all "kinds" of LaTeX take the -output-directory option, even when given with a single - instead of --? I mean pdflatex, xelatex, lualatex, etc.

The help pages of some show options with -, others show them with --.

(I did try and everything seems to work. Just want to make sure I didn't miss anything.)

egreg

@Szabolcs Options can have - or --; it's the same.

@Szabolcs Probably, but not all kinds of LaTeX users ;-). I never use this option, imho it is more trouble than help.

10:38 AM

@UlrikeFischer Can you tell me why is it more trouble? I want to use it for the following reason: I have a Mathematica package that typesets math expressions using LaTeX. Some versions of Mathematica for Windows have an annoying bug where they can't launch external executables if the path to the current directory contains non-ASCII characters and the system locale has certain settings.

Some Windows users have non-ASCII characters in their usernames, which means that the temporary directory (which my package uses as its working directory) will have non-ASCII characters in its path.

So things fail.

One workaround is to run LaTeX in the root directory, pass the working directory to it as an option, and hope for the best (i.e. that it won't attempt writing into the current directory)

I don't like this at all, but so far I haven't been able to come up with a better workaround.

I am trying to assess the risk of going with this approach.

@Szabolcs Because most output files of latex are also input files -- not only for latex but also for other tools like bibtex, biber, makeindex and more. Every other week there is a question because some tool didn't find its input files because of wrongly used --output-directory. Or worse some tool did find the wrong input files when older versions lie around in the current directory.

The package doesn't invoke anything else than pdflatex (or variants) and Ghostscript, but after your comment I feel even more uneasy about doing this.

@Szabolcs I absolutly don't understand your description. If mathematica has difficulties to start latex why should output-directory change this? And if you can launch latex why can't you first issue a cd to switch directory if needed?

10:55 AM

@UlrikeFischer On some computers, Mathematica won't launch external processes if the current directory has special characters. So instead of launching latex in c:\\badDírectory, I want to launch it in c:\` and pass -output-directory=c:\\badDírectory`.

Mathematica can only launch processes, not run arbitrary shell commands. Thus I can't run cd somewhere, latex something.

Well, I could launch cmd.exe, and feed these commands to it, but that would make an even bigger system-specific mess (and I think it would also pop up a visible cmd window)

I might just give up on this. It's not my job to clean up Wolfram's mess :((

I should try to see if using short path names on Windows avoids the problem ...

That should be ` instead of \`. (Too used to the need to escape `` in strings.)

@Szabolcs Launching a process like this in a parent directory is imho a very bad idea. Without the -output-directory option you could even overwrite files there (and in subfolders).

But I do use -output-directory, so if that option is robust enough, in principle there should be no issue. The question is if it is really robust enough. There are so many random ways things can go wrong, that I am feeling very uncomfortable about doing it. The same goes for running Ghostscript.

@Szabolcs "In principle" is the way to hell ;-). Do you want to tell your users "I'm going outside the current directory to launch a application in your root directory, but don't fear in principle there should be no issue"? I wouldn't this. Better tell them that due to a serious bug in mathematica your package won't work in some cases.

@UlrikeFischer I'll probably do that.

They should complain to Wolfram instead.

I think I am going to provide a configuration option where users can set the temporary directory to use (if the default system temp directory causes an issue).

This way they can work around the problem themselves, and I don't have to risk things going wrong with the vast majority of users who are unaffected by the bug.