[tex-live] texlive2008 install-tl fails on Windows XP Chinese traditional

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Sun Oct 26 10:26:06 CET 2008


2008/10/26 Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de>:
> Nien-Po Chen writes:
>  > To whom it may concern,
>  >
>  > I cannot find any other e-mail addresses to report this problem, so I
>  > send it to you. I wold like to install TeXLive 2008 to Windows XP
>  > (Chinese traditional).  The installer stops, as shown in the attached
>  > screen shots.  It seems the installer cannot handle the folder names
>  > (in traditional Chinese) properly and fails in mkdir.  Any
>  > suggestion?  Thanks.
>
> Hi,
> another Chinese reported a similar problem with TeX Live 2007 which
> had a completely different installer.  In order to avoid the problem
> in TeX Live 2008, I sent him a program which converted an environment
> variable containing a path into a list of bytes in hexadecimal
> notation and asked him to send me the result back.
>
> But the result was discouraging.  I had not been able to find out
> which character encoding had been used.  The string contained a path
> where one directory contained his name, a single Chinese character.
> This character was represented by two bytes while the rest of the
> string ("C:\Documents and Settings\...") had been single-byte ASCII
> characters.
>
> The problem is that Perl expects forward slashes as directory
> separators.  Thus, if a path is entered in one of the menus or it's

Are you sure that forward slashes are necessary? I do not have
experience with windows, only with OS/2 which comes almost from the
same world. The system functions recognize both forward slashes and
backslashes as path separators, only some programs complain if forward
slashes are found. It is therefore possible to use both, even the mix
of forward and back slashes in the file name. In Rexx // acts the same
way as -- meaning that this is an end of command line parameters. It
is therefore impossible to put http://www.tug.org as a parameter but
if I invoke Java program from a script written in Rexx, I can specify
http:\\www.tug.org and Java converts the backslashes to forward
slashes automatically. (I tried this both with Java from Innotek and
Java from Golden Code.)

> taken from an environment variable, backslashes have to be converted
> to forward slashes.  The only character encoding I'm aware of which
> allows such a conversion without breaking multi-byte characters is
> UTF-8.
>
> About a year ago I discussed this issue with Hans Hagen.  He assumed
> that, though Windows probably uses UTF-8 for file names internally,
> the user interfaces are using character encodings based on national
> standards.  This explains the result of our test.  He suggested to
> convert file names to short names (Siep mentioned it already too).
> Then a path containing East Asian characters will be converted to a
> string containing ASCII characters only.  However, this is not always
> possible because some programs have to determine how they had been
> invoked.  In this case short names are not usable.
>
> I'm sad that I can't provide better news.  I even don't know whether
> this problem can be solved at all.  Maybe a Perl/Windows expert from
> East Asia could provide more information.
>
> At the moment, all I can recommend is to install TeX Live in a
> directory which doesn't contain multi-byte (East Asian) characters in
> its path.  It's definitely not a solution because on Vista you'll
> certainly are not allowed to install TeX Live in a directory of your
> choice.
>
> Is there anybody who is experienced with Perl on Windows in China,
> Japan, or Korea who can provide more information?
>
> Regards,
>  Reinhard
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
> Marschnerstr. 25
> D-30167 Hannover                              mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz


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