#56 Error when using texindy within paths containing diacritics/umlauts

[Tobi]

I wonder if it is possible to use texindy in project where the project path contains umlauts, e.g. /Users/Tobi/Desktop/äbc/test/. With this path I get an error message:

Tobis-Mac:test Tobi$ texindy test.idx
Opening logfile "/dev/null" (done)
Reading indexstyle...
Loading module "/var/folders/1n/d3h2l7zj14z39dbv4k9ng6_m0000gp/T/t9SopP1Rvv"...

Error in line 1:
(require "lang/general/latin9-lang.xdy")
ERROR: PARSE-NAMESTRING: syntax error in filename "/Users/Tobi/Desktop/äbc/test/" at position 21

While a path like /Users/Tobi/Desktop/abc/test/(a instead of ä) works fine. To reproduce the error you may put this MWE

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{makeidx}
\makeindex

\begin{document}
Test\index{Test}
\printindex
\end{document}

in a folder like …/äbc/test/ and then run

pdflatex test.tex
texindy test.idx

I know that in the TeX world it is better to use only lowercase a–z filenames and I do respect this for all TeX related filenames an the first parent folder (test/ in this example) but I can’t for higher parent folders (äbc/ here) because these folds be names of clients that contain umlauts and I want to keep them. For TeX everything is fine that way but texindy seems to have a problem with umlauts anywhere in the path.

I’m using this version (shipped with Tex Live 2013) on OS X 10.9.3:

Tobis-Mac:~ Tobi$ texindy -V
xindy release: 2.4
texindy script version: 1.11
xindy script version: 1.16
xindy kernel version: 3.0
CLISP version 2.48 (2009-07-28) (built on richard-kochs-computer.local [10.0.1.2])
    architecture: X86_64

[Tobi]

Hi, ist there any news about this bug? It seems like it still exists in version 2.5.1 unfortunatly.

[Tobi]

One year later and it still exists … any news, please?

[Joachim Schrod]

This issue is caused by a deficiency in CLISP, the Common Lisp (CL) implementation that we use as a base. It is not solvable by any change in xindy.

CLISP is all but abandoned, no new release since 2010. While there has been some work on porting xindy to a different CL system, this has not been followed through to be a part of a future release. (Please note that there are no stand-alone releases of xindy since quite some years since nobody was interested in them; any changes are released as part of the annual TeX Live release.)

Thus, don't hold your breath that your problem will be solved any time soon. I can't solve it, I don't even have a Mac to reproduce it -- and doing the migration work to another CL base system is not on my work list ATM. Well, I couldn't even say if that new base system would not have your problem as well... File name encodings are very touchy, it's extremely to get them right over all relevant operating systems (Linux, Windows, and Mac), and I wouldn't bet that another CL system doesn't have the same or a similar problem as CLISP.

[Tobi]

I see … thanks for the detailt answer! :-)

[tatojox]

I just tried your MWE in directory .../äbc/test/ Ubuntu 18.04, texlive 2018, and runs fine. For texindy -V got:

xindy release: 2.5.1
texindy script version: 1.13
xindy script version: 1.18
xindy kernel version: 3.0
CLISP version 2.49.92 (2018-02-18) (built on bulldog [127.0.0.1])
    architecture: X86_64

and was able to run, without complain, in that directory:

pdflatex test.tex
texindy test.idx
pdflatex test.tex

and got test.pdf.