kpathsea: TeX support
6 TeX support
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Although the basic features in Kpathsea can be used for any type of path
searching, it came about, as usual, with a specific application in mind:
I wrote Kpathsea specifically for TeX system programs. I had been
struggling with the programs I was using (Dvips, Xdvi, and TeX itself)
having slightly different notions of how to specify paths; and debugging
was painful, since no code was shared.
Therefore, Kpathsea provides some TeX-specific formats and features.
Indeed, many of the purportedly generic path searching features were
provided because they seemed useful in that conTeXt (font lookup,
particularly).
Kpathsea provides a standard way to search for files of any of the
supported file types; glyph fonts are a bit different than all the rest.
Searches are based solely on names of files, not their contents--if a GF
file is (mis)named 'cmr10.600pk', it will be found as a PK file.
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