[OS X TeX] epstopdf

[Chris Goedde]

On Sep 27, 2005, at 7:03 PM, Claus Gerhardt wrote:

> The unix conventions were created out of necessity or out of 
> convenience and most, if not all, software that uses these conventions 
> is free. When the Mac became a unix machine and tetex and friends were 
> ported to OS X by the unselfish work and devotion of people like 
> Thomas Esser, Gerben Wierda, Richard Koch, Sebastian Rahtz to name 
> only a few, these conventions were kept at least at the shell script's 
> level.
>
> Calling these people lazy because the restrictions do not suit your 
> idiosyncratic naming  habits strikes me as slightly ungrateful.

I don't really want to extend this, and Bruno did a nice job of 
speaking up for me, but I would like to add a couple things. This will 
be my last message on this, I promise.

I shouldn't have used the word lazy, but words like foolish and 
idiosyncratic are more than a little patronizing, and that's what I was 
responding to. I was a bit intemperate and I apologize for that. I've 
been using TeX for over 20 years, mostly on unix machines, and I am 
EXTREMELY grateful to everyone who built this fabulous software.

One the other hand, there have been well-established, widely used 
methods in unix for dealing with spaces in names for a long, long time, 
and I was surprised, given the overall quality of TeX and friends, that 
a shell script that shipped with TeX didn't handle paths with spaces in 
them properly. If the developers think that my choices are foolish, 
then this won't change. Of course, (and I say this seriously, not 
sarcastically) I could teach myself perl and re-write epstopdf.

On the third hand, until a few years ago, TeX (at least TeX built on 
web2c on unix) didn't properly handle files with `.' in the name. E.g., 
it compiled The.File.tex into The.dvi, rather than The.File.dvi. This 
was (properly) seen as a bug, and fixed. I would hope that spaces in 
names (and certainly paths) would be treated the same way.

Chris

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