----- Original Message -----
From: "Helge Hafting" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Bo Peng" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <lyx-users@lists.lyx.org>; "LyX Devel" <lyx-devel@lists.lyx.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2006 11:48 PM
Subject: Re: sixth release of LyXWinInstaller
The best fix is to have tex fixed. Second best is lyx providing
a workaround. Either approach needs a volunteer - I wonder
why nobody seems to want to fix tex though.
Helge Hafting
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/msg/6d9312da816b96f7?hl=en&;
Dan Luecking wrote:
"TeX has been designed with a basic command \input. Normally it takes a
space as ending the name. MiKTeX amends this to allow spaces if the
name is (double) quoted. On the otherhand, some tools used with TeX
don't like spaces. If a chain of tools is invoked, quotes may get
stripped, and if even one tool does this (batch files processing can
do this) then later tools in the chain, even space-aware tools,
will fail. ...
Microsoft was just showing off when it named system default
directories with spaces. This already makes it confusing to read
Environmental variables. It forces additional levels of filename
processing in programs (check for quotes around flenames, add them
only if not already there. Try to program batch files for all the
cases.) I'm sure Microsoft is intentionally trying to make it
hard for Unix-style tools to work in Windows."
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SH: To me, Dan seems like a reliable supplier of information.
TeX was invented around 1982 and didn't run on Windows.
Leslie Lamport writes:
"In the early 80s, I was planning to write the Great American Concurrency
Book. I was a TeX user, so I would need a set of macros. I thought that,
with a little extra effort, I could make my macros usable by others. Don
Knuth had begun issuing early releases of the current version of TeX, and
I figured I could write what would become its standard macro package. That
was the beginning of LaTeX. I was planning to write a user manual, but it
never occurred to me that anyone would actually pay money for it. In
1983,"...
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SH: Maybe Win95 had paths with spaces. Win98 had paths with spaces
which needed to be double quoted ("blah blah blah"). WinXP works
quite well with spaces. My point is that TeX was designed to work the
way it does, it is not a bug. I don't think TeX would be easy to fix and
retain compatibility with earlier files. Should the next word of input after
a space part of the filename/path or when TeX usually begins operation?
I've also read that \includegraphics used to have a problem with paths with
spaces. Angus says this was fixed and he says bibtex/natbib has not been
fixed yet. I am not so sure that a Miktex/ProTeXt developer is going to
see this as a problem/bug with Miktex. I've been reading about the hassle
of integrating Auctex-preview into Xemacs. The Linux world doesn't take
responsibility for fixing smaller packages that work with their big package,
or even go so far as to make it easy to include them.
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Helge wrote: > The best fix is to have tex fixed.
SH: Perhaps you can understand my doubt that this is a viable or
even optimal solution, considering backward compatibility.
Helge wrote: > Second best is lyx providing a workaround.
SH: Not trying to be contentious, but this seems first best to me.
And better than the error message idea. How important is fixing this?
I do think it has some value; I'm not disputing that.
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Best regards,
Stephen
