[tex-live] Re: tex4ht bugfix

[Olaf Weber]

Eitan Gurari writes:

> Would a code similar to the following within tex4ht.c work?

>   system("TEX4HTFONTSET={alias,iso8859/2}; export TEX4HTFONTSET");
>   htfname= kpse_find_file (name, kpse_program_text_format, 0);    

No: the system(3) call is executed in a "subshell" which means that
changes to environment variables in the subshell are not propagated
back to the parent.

What _may_ work is

        xputenv("TEX4HTFONTSET", "{alias,iso8859/2}");

which puts the definition into the environment of the current process.
(xputenv() is a variant of putenv(3) included in kpathsea.)

I think that due to the caching done by kpathsea, you'd have to put
these values into the environment before the first call to
kpse_find_file() or kpse_open_file().

It might make sense to have tex4ht set the "client_path" of the
kpse_format_info structures it uses before initializing them.  (I'm
open for suggestions for a better -- that is, explainable --
interface.)

[...]

> I wonder whether I can help compiling tex4ht.c for kpathsea on my 
> unix account. I tried the command line

>   gcc -o tex4ht tex4ht.c -DKPATHSEA -I/usr/local/teTeX/include
>                                     -L/usr/local/teTeX/lib
>                                     -L/usr/local/teTeX/include/kpathsea 

> at a private directory, and got complains of the form

>     config.h: No such file or directory
>    c-errno.h: No such file or directory

> The files are at /usr/local/teTeX/include/kpathsea.

You may want to retrieve

        http://www.xs4all.nl/~infovore/tex4htk.tgz

which is a cut-down version of the current TeX Live development source
tree: it contains just kpathsea and tex4ht, with enough supporting
files that you should be able to do "./configure" and "make" to
compile it.  This may make experimentation easier.

-- 
Olaf Weber

               (This space left blank for technical reasons.)