[XeTeX] Experiences with XeTeX on Debian Sarge and Ubuntu Edgy Eft

[Jonathan Kew]

On 24 Oct 2006, at 4:11 pm, Christoph Bier wrote:

>
> I updated my hyperref installation because my old installation
> didn't know the dvipdfmx driver. But now I find that XeTeX searches
> the wrong path:
>
> chris at lotus:/tmp$ grep -i hyperref.cfg xetexref.log
> (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/hyperref/hyperref.cfg
> File: hyperref.cfg 2002/06/06 v1.2 hyperref configuration of TeXLive
> and teTeX
> chris at lotus:/tmp$ kpsewhich hyperref.cfg
> /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/xelatex/hyperref.cfg
> chris at lotus:/tmp$ head -2 `kpsewhich hyperref.cfg`
> \ProvidesFile{hyperref.cfg}%
>   [2006/06/07 v1.2b hyperref configuration of XeTeX]

I think this indicates an incorrect TEXINPUTS.xelatex value in  
texmf.cnf. I have seen some distributions that ship with a setting  
such as

   TEXINPUTS.xelatex = .;$TEXMF/tex/{latex,generic,}//

predefined. (From memory, may not be precisely what you have.) This  
is not a good search path; I recommend something like:

   TEXINPUTS.xelatex = .;$TEXMF/tex/{xelatex,latex,generic,}//

instead. While you're there, you might also want to check for

   TEXINPUTS.xetex = .;$TEXMF/tex/{xetex,plain,generic,}//

or similar, though I think there are fewer situations where it  
matters for the Plain-based format.

JK