Subject: Re: Lars suggested tests

From: RDS <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2020 19:06:23 -0700

I have tried the tests you suggest on refcard.tex (plus a few others in
that dir) with & without -Q cl switch; nearly all failed to produce a dvi.
Immediately tex fails since it can *not* find the source file as I
described previously. (Also review additional material in bug 42624.) The
results are identical on both a Slackware-current partition installation &
on a Fedora 32 partition installation.

The Texlive installations are current & direct compilation on any tex /
latex source files functions flawlessly. I also have a tiny piece of lisp
code that directly invokes, via start-process, the tex / latex compiler;
it, too, never has a problem.

Reiterating, the tex-shell created by tex-mode.el does *not* see a path to
the source unless modifications I suggest are made as in bug 42624.

Is this possibly a configuration issue? Could there be hidden environmental
variables that need to be set either in my bash shell or something I am
missing in the init.el? Official emacs documentation about tex-mode says
little about this matter. As an aside, inside tex-mode.el, there is a
getenv ESHELL command. Does ESHELL need some special attention?