[texworks] %!TEX root =

[Reinhard Kotucha]

Jonathan Kew writes:
 > On 1 Jan 2009, at 18:48, Joseph Wright wrote:
 > 
 > > Hello all,
 > >
 > > Does the %!TEX root = <whatever> comment work in TeXworks?  My testing
 > > seems to fail, and I can't see it in a quick search of the source,  
 > > either.
 > 
 > It's supposed to work. (See the function  
 > TeXDocument::findRootFilePath(). It uses a regexp to allow flexibility  
 > about spacing, perhaps that's why you didn't find it with a simple  
 > search.)

Hi Jonathan,
I'm not sure, but I suppose that "TeX root" is the root of a particular
TeX distribution.

I'm wondering why I have to specify the root of my TeX distribution at
all.  Can't it be derived automatically?  On Unix, for example, `which
pdftex` will return the /path/to/pdftex.  However, the fact that
texworks allows me to overwrite the default is a great thing because I
can have more than one TeX distribution on my system and can choose
which one I want to use.  But for beginners it's certainly easier if
default values are determined automatically.

If

   %!TEX root = <whatever>

really sets the root of a particular TeX distribution, I must admit
that I'm not very happy with it because I don't think it's a good idea
to put system/platform/distribution related things into TeX source
files.  TeX source files should be as system independent as possible.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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