[tex-live] behaviour of kpsewhich on case-insensitive mac system

[Zdenek Wagner]

The problem with case sensitivity is as follows:

A user on a case insensitive file system has files MAIN.TEX and
CHAPTER1.TEX. The MAIN.TEX contains the following line:

\input chapter1

The files are then sent to someone else wit a case sensitive file system.
The compilation will fail because chapter1.tex does not exist. If it is
just a fone failing file, it is not a big proble but imagine that you sned
a whole book with dozen chapters each of which includes dozen images and
the file names have wrong case. It is horror to make such document compile.
And some users include an image several times using different case each
time, e.g. \includegraphics{myimage1}, \includegraphics{MyImage1},
\includegraphics{Myimage1.EPS}, \includegraphics{MyImage1.Eps} etc. Believe
me, I had to process such books and it may take dozen hours to make it work.

Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz

2017-09-19 0:56 GMT+02:00 Justin C. Walker <justin at me.com>:

>
> > On Sep 18, 2017, at 09:18 , jfbu <jfbu at free.fr> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have a question,
> >
> > $ kpsewhich example-image-A.pdf
> >
> > $ kpsewhich example-image-a.pdf
> > /usr/local/texlive/2017/texmf-dist/tex/latex/mwe/example-image-a.pdf
>
> I’;m using TeXLive 2017 (up to date) on  on macOS 10.11.6.
>
> I duplicated Phillip’s example (i.e., I got the same results he did).
>
> I also used your example, with the same results, so I don’t understand why
> case should affect the outcome.
>
> What versions of TeX and (I assume) macOS are you using?
>
> > But I am on a case-insensitive file system:
> >
> > $ touch foo
> >
> > $ mv foo Foo
> >
> > $ rm foo
> >
> > $ ls Foo
> > ls: Foo: No such file or directory
> >
> > I was wondering why an `\includegraphics{example-image-A}` failed
> > (which I got from some post on tex.sx) and I surmise from the above
> > that this has possibly to do with kpsewhich or at least with the way
> > pdftex finds files.
> >
> > I guess the rationale is that if kpsewhich were to be
> > case-insensitive on OSes with case insensitive file systems,
> > TeX documents would more easily behave differently on different
> > systems ?
> >
> > Best
> >
> > Jean-François
> >
> >
>
> --
> Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon at Large
> Institute for the Absorption of Federal Funds
> -----------
> If it weren't for carbon-14, I wouldn't date at all.
> -----------
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/attachments/20170920/732e9447/attachment.html>