On Oct 9, 2010, at 7:25 PM, Thomas S. Dye wrote:

On Oct 9, 2010, at 6:42 AM, Nick Dokos wrote:

Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> wrote:

I am looking for a way out which will allow pdf compilation of Org

work out of the box, and still allow texi2dvi to be used where possible.

I have so far come up with two possible work-arounds and would

like to hear if one of them makes sense:

1.  I could set the environment variable LC_ALL

 for the duration of the texi2dvi command to some value

 like C?  That should fix the egrep call, but could

 it have adverse effects on the pdflatex and bibtex runs or

 any other stuff used in texi2dvi?

Yes, at least theoretically. I don't think anybody has gone down

the path of investigating these effects.

2. On startup, I could use

(if (= 0 (shell-command "echo foo | egrep \"[A-z]\""))

         ....

to check if there is a problem and in this case go for

manual pdflatex runs rather than using texi2dvi.  THis might work,

but it would be a bit unpredictable what ends up being used,

and with no setup in Org you could get different sets of commands

on different machines.

The trouble with this is that you are checking on egrep which will give

you a positive for egrep versions >= 2.6.x, but the fix to texi2dvi might

have made that irrelevant. How about

  try

     texi2dvi

  except

     do Seb's thrice-repeated pdflatex (or whatever) call

After everybody has updated to the latest texinfo, the exception code

can be taken out.

Alternatively, the texi2dvi method can be reverted: it was an idea that

was worth trying, but it has caused more harm than good at this point

- maybe it can be revisited in six months.

Any ather ideas?  Comments?

Perhaps org-latex-to-pdf-process should just run pdflatex twice (or three times) so that it most likely will work out of the box.  IIUC, the user can set this variable to something else.

I think this is the best idea.  I am going to set the default to 3 runs of pdflatex and provide a customization option to use texi2dvi.
FOr now, I think the danger of this going wrong for unsuspecting users is worse than the advantage of using texi2dvi.

So if texi2dvi works on your system, just configure org-latex-to-pdf-process.  If you use the customize interface to do the customization, one of the options will be texi2dvi.

Some ready-to-use alternatives on Worg might be useful.  There, the pitfalls of using texi2dvi could be explained and those with systems where it works could find a recipe and make use of it.  The use of other latex make files might be illustrated there as well.

Good idea.