2

texlive, osx/linux.

I believe it is impossible to place one's personal latex style and class files in a superior directory in the hierarchy, because of the way that the kpse library works (fixed directory index). That is, I would have liked to place

/myjournal1
/myjournal1/journal.sty
/myjournal1/article1/document1.tex
/myjournal2
/myjournal2/journal.sty
/myjournal2/article1/document1.tex
/myjournal2/below/evenmorebelow/document2.tex

and each .tex file contains \usepackage{journal}. The idea is to instruct kpse first to search up the directory tree and then further up into the standard local and global texmf tree, stopping when it finds a match.

There are at least two workarounds. I can use symbolic links (which dropbox but not copy.com, promptly messes up). Or I can explicitly refer to \usepackage{../journal}, when one level down, and so forth.

This is a minor nuisance, not a major hurdle.

/iaw

Andrew Swann
  • 95,762
ivo Welch
  • 3,766
  • I'm confused. You don't normally have working documents in your TEXMF tree at all. You have these in some other directory. So this shouldn't be a problem. journal.sty goes in your personal TEXMF tree (or your local one or whatever) and the document you are writing lives outside that tree. [But I don't think that this wouldn't work if you did do it. It just strikes me as a bad idea to put these things in your TEXMF tree.] – cfr May 06 '15 at 01:35
  • If you don't want files in the working directory, then give things useful (i.e., unique) names, and put them in your TEXMF tree. What is the point of having non-unique names? – jon May 06 '15 at 03:26
  • yes, these were other alternatives: unique names and reorg. alas, the reason for not wanting the journal.sty in my texmf hierarchy is that I often want to zip up document hierarchies for mailing to others. having the ability to look back up dynamically until one finds a suitable match in the hierarchy is (sometimes) useful, even when it can be worked around. – ivo Welch May 06 '15 at 05:27
  • The package bundledoc solves this problem quite nicely, in my opinion. I once answered a question that gives an overview of how it works (actually, kind of twice). The other solution is to modify the TEXINPUTS variable, which you could do on per-directory basis -- or so I believe: I've never tried myself. – jon May 06 '15 at 06:02

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