[texworks] question on local TEXMFHOME

[Joseph Wright]

On 04/04/2012 15:42, Tim Arnold wrote:
> Hi,
> This isn't a bug, I just have a misunderstanding. I'm on Windows 7,
> using TeXworks (0.4.3 r.858) and I have a locally written package
> 'mypackage'.
> When I give this command in a command window:
> c:> kpsewhich --var-value=TEXMFHOME
> I get the response:
> c:\Users\tim\texmf
> 
> So I put mypackage.sty in that directory and it is not found when I
> compile my document in TeXworks.
> 
> But when I create the correct (?) subdirectories like this:
> 
> c:\Users\tim\texmf\tex\latex\mypackage
> 
> and put mypackage.sty in the mypackage subdirectory, it is found when
> I compile in TeXworks.
> 
> My question is why the package is not found when I put it at the top
> level but it is once I create the tree structure.
> 
> If this is off-topic for the list, I apologize; I'm not sure if this
> is TeXworks or TeX itself.
> 
> thanks for any hints,
> 
> --Tim Arnold

Hello Tim,

This is a TeX question, not a TeXworks one :-)

TeX distributions include a lot of files, and to make searching for them
easier there is a standard layout: the TDS or 'TeX Directory Structure'.
Within a TeX tree, only the 'correct' places are checked for the known
file types. In the case of .sty files, that is inside <texmf>/tex/latex.
(By convention, this is subdivided by package, but that is not required
for the search to work.) In a similar way, .bst files have to be inside
<texmf>/bibtex/bst, and so on.
-- 
Joseph Wright