[OS X TeX] graphicx, pdflatex and pdf file names

[Chris Goedde]

Hi Ross,

Note, before I begin, I'll just say that I'm not upset about this and  
I recognize that reasonable people can have different opinions on  
this issue :-). And thanks again to Williams Adams for providing a  
workaround. With that said ...

On Aug 1, 2007, at 6:47 PM, Ross Moore wrote:

> Yes; I disagree that it is a bug.
> The problem lies in the choice of having a '.' in the filename,  
> other than for the extension.

It's pretty clear to me that filenames should be parsed from right-to- 
left, not left-to-right when looking for extensions, and that any  
program that doesn't do this is broken. (I don't really care about  
the tiny number of file systems that can't handle . in a filename.)  
This is a pretty trivial fix for any code still under development;  
for such programs, choosing to remain broken is exactly that, a choice.

BTW, is this bug, um, I mean feature, in pdflatex or in graphicx? If  
it's in graphicx maybe I'll just try to fix it myself.

At one time, tex (probably web2c, actually) turned foo.bar.tex into  
foo.dvi, not foo.bar.dvi. That eventually got fixed, thank dog. No, I  
don't remember anymore why I had a tex file with a . in the name, I'm  
sure there was a good reason, though.

>    mv  Simulations/Aggregate/Correlation-WP-12.80.pdf  Simulations/ 
> Aggregate/Correlation-WP-12_79.pdf
>    mv  Simulations/Aggregate/Correlation-WP-12.80.pdf  Simulations/ 
> Aggregate/Correlation-WP-12_80.pdf
>    mv  Simulations/Aggregate/Correlation-WP-12.80.pdf  Simulations/ 
> Aggregate/Correlation-WP-12_81.pdf

Yes, I could continually munge all my pdf file names, it's true. They  
are all created in Matlab programatically (e.g. via sprintf('foo-%. 
2f.pdf', variable_name). I could add some logic after that to parse  
the name myself and munge it to work around this bug, ugh! I'll stick  
with the workaround that William Adams suggested.

> This may actually work for you under OS X, where PDF is essentially  
> a native format;
> but will it work for other people, using other systems?

It's 2007, I'm tired of catering to MSDOS 1.0.

Just my $0.02!

-- 
Chris Goedde


------------------------- Helpful Info -------------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Archive: http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/
List Reminders & Etiquette: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/list/