Re: [Texmacs-dev] Absolute versus relative file:... paths

[David Allouche]

On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 02:34:13PM -0700, Nix wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-02-04 at 13:04, Nix wrote:
> > I would like to complain about the absolute-path references TeXmacs
> > makes to, say, PostScript images.
> 
> An idea: Why not make this a user-selectable checkbox choice, like
> "automatically close brackets":
> 
> "absolute include paths"

The issue is more involved than that.

Basically, my position is that silently using absolute paths for images
in a document is always a bug, because it prevents the document from
being anything near portable. Maybe in some cases, someone may actually
want to use an absolute path, that would still be possible by editing
the "postscript" tag by hand.

The basic problem is: "what to do when linking an image from a document
which has not already been given a name". Giving a name means saving the
document the first time on disk. Before that, relative paths do not
really make sense. I think it should not be allowed to link image from
unnamed documents.

Also, I rememeber at some point, even after the document had been saved,
image links were still created as absolute paths, at least until the
document was closed and reopened. That is clearly a bug, and if it has
not been already fixed, should be fixed.

This kind of problem has been known for a long time, if that really
bothers you, you should scratch your own itch and submit a patch.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa