[tex-live] SyncTeX should always write absolute paths

Philipp Stephani st_philipp at yahoo.de
Sat Oct 3 11:27:40 CEST 2009


Am 03.10.2009 um 09:59 schrieb David Kastrup:

> Philipp Stephani <st_philipp at yahoo.de> writes:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> probably this is the wrong place to ask, but I'm unsure who exactly  
>> is
>> responsible for SyncTeX in TeX Live. However, I think that SyncTeX
>> should always output absolute paths. The current behavior is to write
>> relative paths for the input files, which breaks inverse search e.g.
>> in Skim when a different output directory is set via -output-
>> directory. I could easily fix this by having my build script replace
>> all input paths with absolute paths. It would be great if SyncTeX
>> wrote absolute paths right from the beginning.
>
> I don't think that this is a good idea, with the possible exception of
> -output being specified as an absolute path, but even then I am not
> sure.  Why don't you run Skim with the same current directory as TeX?
> You don't need to have its current directory be the output  
> directory, do
> you?

I don't think OS X applications have a meaningful concept of "current  
directory." And even if they have, is the current directory local to  
the document or the application? In any case it doesn't work  
regardless whether I start Skim from the input directory. Probably it  
uses the directory of the .synctex.gz file as starting point for  
relative paths, and I think this is entirely fine because the SyncTeX  
functionality should not depend on how the viewer was started. Since  
the input directory doesn't seem to be stored in the synctex file, the  
viewer has no possibility of finding the input files.

> The problem with absolute paths is that moving the TeX directory
> anywhere else (USB stick, separate mount points, zip here, unpack  
> there)
> will break things.

That is correct, but I think this would be a minor flaw because the  
correct information will be restored as soon as the document is  
recompiled. However, if relative paths are a requirement, they should  
be either relative to the output directory or not used at all when the  
output directory differs from the input directory.


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