[tex-live] How does pdflatex call mktexpk on windows

Lars Madsen daleif at imf.au.dk
Thu Aug 7 16:51:46 CEST 2014


Hi, just had an interesting isssue with a Windows user using texstudio

He just installed TL14 and complained that one of his old files did no longer compile in TeXStudio

It turns that the standard path towards the files through his mounted file system ended up giving him a UNC path to the file (TS shows "\\servername\path\test.tex" in the titlebar)

In TS the pdflatex call will be similar to

pdflatex <options> PATH/file.tex

where PATH is the PATH given to TS from the OS. Here is ends up being an UNC path

In his file he was using bbm, it is a metafont font, so it has to generate pk files on compilation. How ever this fails in TS then opening a file through a UNC path. If we do through the drive specification for the same path, there is no problem.

So my question is, who does pdflatex make the call to mktexpk (or what ever program it is)?

I'm suspecting a call to cmd.exe or similar, which woule explaing the failure as cmd.exe does not support UNC paths.

I'm not looking for a solution to the problem just an explanation as to how exactly mktexpk is called from pdflatex on Windows.




/Lars Madsen
Institut for Matematik / Department of Mathematics
Aarhus Universitet / Aarhus University
Mere info: http://au.dk/daleif@imf / More information: http://au.dk/en/daleif@imf




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