[texworks] Specifying output directory with texworks

[Stefan Löffler]

Hi,

you sent your last mail to me personally. I'm answering to the mailing
list since this issue may affect other users as well...

On 2010-01-07 05:03, Powell, Olly wrote:
>
> I have narrowed down the problem a little since then.  It is defiantly
> a case of TW or Miktex Portable not coping with the .tex file being on
> a network drive.  It works fine when I transfer it to my hard drive.  
> On the network drive I get the error message: 
>
> '\\networkshare\some <file://%5C%5CREGED002%5Cgroup$Solar>\path\there'
>
> [texworks] Specifying output directory with texworks
>
> CMD.EXE was started with the above path as the current directory.
>
> UNC paths are not supported.  Defaulting to Windows directory.
>

To me, this seems to be a problem with Windows, not with Tw. As this
message indicates (and some pages on the internet as well), the Windows
command line (cmd.exe) doesn't support navigating network (UNC) paths.
So you shouldn't be able to say the following on the command line:
    cd \\networkshare\
However, this is just what Tw/LaTeX need. They set the current working
directory to the path of the tex file and run whatever typesetting tool
from there. It's the first step that doesn't work. In fact, I find it
rather curious that typesetting works at all. Have you ever tried
typesetting more complex documents (i.e. ones that are split over
several files or include images)?

> It also has a drive name "G",  I tried putting that into the TexWorks
> directory paths list, but that didn't seem to help.
>

Adding it to the paths list won't help (that's used for finding programs
only, AFAIK). However, if you could open the file from drive G instead
of your network share, I imagine it would work. The only question is if
you _can_ open something from drive G or if this is automatically
resolved to be \\networkshare\what\ever\. But I'd give it a try and open
the file from G.

> For now I can live with working on my hard drive, but it would be
> better if I could figure out how to put the work back on the network.
>

Agreed, the situation is not ideal. However, as elaborated above, this
is rather a Windows (command line) problem. Do you have any experience
with other TeX editors that handle this case correctly?

HTH
Stefan
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