[OS X TeX] path names with umlauts

[Ross Moore]

Hi Friedrich,

On 20/03/2012, at 23:22, RA Friedrich Vosberg <fv at rafv.de> wrote:

> Am 20.03.2012 um 12:40 schrieb Peter Weidenmueller:
> 
>> german umlaut should NEVER be used in information technology.
>> a system patch could make it very hard to access the files / folders.
>> you should use ue instead of ü, ae instead of ä, etc
>> additional special chars should be avoided, too (space, komma)
>> it is better to use '_'. 
>> ascii-char is THE standard, at information-technology. 
> 
> Hmm. I'll give Apple's way of localization a try:
> 
> https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPInternational/Articles/LocalizingPathnames.html
> 
> What do you think about this approach?

This seems to be saying that the directory names should be standard, as in ASCII,
but that you can specify alternatives for some software to display; e.g. Finder.

It is a 2-step process to get the names.

First you have a file called  .localized  which has lines specifying files which will contain the strings that you want displayed, according to your localization.
e.g.
     en.strings
     de.strings
 etc.

Now you have string pairs listed in   de.strings :

 gruenther Grünther
 mueller Müller
 gruen_muell Grünther,\ Müller

etc.

Now your German Finder should display the umlauts, but an English one would not.
However, your LaTeX document will need to use the non-localized ASCII names, as it does not use Finder when searching for files.


Warning: I've not actually tried this. I'm just interpreting what was written on that Apple page.
                Hopefully What I say above is correct.

Also, since you have already got directories name with umlauts, I'd expect that there is already a file named  .localized  in the parent directory, and Finder is consulting this.
Since this is an invisible file, you will need to know how to list and view files whose names start with '.'.  However, the files which contain the actual string replacements should be listable. 
Do you have any files starting  de.????   that you did not create yourself?

> 
> Kind regards, Friedrich

Hope this helps,

    Ross
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