Angus Leeming <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> Paul A. Rubin wrote: >> Sounds right for *nix, but spaces in paths are a way of life in the >> Windoze world (not sure about Macs, but I think they're legal there, >> too). > > And your point is? That those of us using Windows (not all voluntarily, I might add) do have to make accommodations (such as renaming directories, or adding symbolic links) to use LyX (and, for that matter, most any software ported from Unix-like systems). The generalization of the prior post that "file and directory names should NEVER contain spaces" is a bit draconian in the Windows world, if not inapt. After all, the operating system is geared toward having all programs installed in "\Program Files" and most of your documents in "My Documents". In fact, in some institutional settings, you may be required to follow those guidelines (either to ensure that your files are backed up, or to keep the network police happy). > > LyX could happily support spaces in paths. However, it farms out all > the 'hard' work to other utilities. Specifically, to farms out the > typesetting of the printed page to TeX. TeX can't handle spaces in > paths. > > We do debate occasionally whether we should _force_ you all to use a > temp directory for all the temporary files generated during the > creation of a dvi,ps or pdf file. Such a requirement _would_ enable > you to visualise your output because we could mangle all file names. > If the path of the tmp directory did not contain spaces that is. Wouldn't there still be a problem with spaces in the path to the source files? > However, you'd still run into problems when you exported the latex > file and gave it to a co-worker. > > So. There is no obvious work around for a TeX limitation. Don't use > spaces in file paths if you want LyX to work as you'd like. Since I'm using the Cygwin port, my solution is to put symlinks in my Cygwin home directory pointing to wherever in the "My Documents" subtree a particular project is parked. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy with LyX, and the space-in-the-path issue is not a big deal to me. It does, however, seem to come up fairly regularly in the group. Just out of curiosity, have you given any consideration to escaping spaces in paths when passing them to external apps (as in /My\ Documents/Path\ to\ Project/whatever)? -- Paul
