[OS X TeX] simpdftex and spaces in filenames

[Herbert Schulz]

On May 23, 2008, at 6:23 AM, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 23 mai 08 à 11:27, Enrico Franconi a écrit :
>
>> if a have a tex file with a space in its name, then simpdftex fails.
>>
>> simpdftex --mode dvips a\ b.tex
>> [...]
>>
>> How can this be fixed? I tried to call it in various ways, but to  
>> no avail.
>
> A quick-and-dirty fix is two run simpdftex twice, with different  
> syntaxes:
>
> simpdftex a\ b.tex
> simpdftex a\ b.dvi
>
> First run creates "a b.dvi" but passes on filename ab.dvi to dvips  
> which then fails. Second run applies directly dvips to "a b.dvi" and  
> generates ab.ps then launches ps2pdf which creates ab.pdf.  
> Extension .dvi in the second command is optional.
>
> It seems the problem lies inside simpdftex in the variable
>
> 	nosuffixbasename=`printf "%s" ${basename}|sed 's/\.[^.]*$//'`
>
> which eliminates the space you may have introduced through "\ " in  
> Terminal. It's far beyond my programming abilities to propose a fix  
> for that.
>
> Bruno Voisin


Howdy,

Unfortunately, the best way to get around this problem is to NOT use  
spaces in a .tex file name.

I first ran into this problem many years ago under OS 7 and TeXtures  
(I think it was 1.6 at that time). When I sent in a bug report to Blue  
Sky I got back what I considered a nasty reply to the effect that I  
expected them to rewrite all of TeX. Didn't bother them again.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest.com)