Re: latex exporting to different directory with v9.0

[Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr>]

Hello,

Alex Fenton <alex.fenton@pressure.to> writes:

> One thing that has unfortunately stopped working is my setup for
> exporting to pdf, putting all the intermediary  (.tex, .aux, .bbl,
> etc) and output files in a different directory to the source .org
> files. My setup is basically
>
> project/
> - images/
> - out/
>
> with all the .org files in the project base directory. A simple
> publishing set-up exported .tex to out/ then called org-latex-compile.
>
> With 9.0, org-latex-compile hands off to org-compile-file, in which
> (as documented) "`default-directory' is set to SOURCE directory during
> the whole
> process." This means, however, that all the image and bibliograpy
> links in the .org files are now broken, since they point to
> ./img/foo.png and not ../img/foo.png

Honestly, I'm surprised it worked. I'm also surprised it could be
related to `default-directory' set-up, since links are created during
Org -> LaTeX conversion, whereas `org-compile-file' handles LaTeX ->
PDF. What is that "simple publishing set-up" you are talking about?

Not that there is not something fishy in `org-compile-file' at the
moment (see, e.g.,
<http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/110030>), but I cannot
see a way out without breaking some eggs.

Basically, there are three directories to consider: source (".tex")
directory, output (".pdf") directory, and working directory, i.e.,
probably ".org" file directory.

The assumption for `org-compile-file', and before it,
`org-latex-compile', is that source and output directories are the same.
Hence `org-compile-file' returns an error when

  (concat out-dir tex-file.pdf)

cannot be found.

Now, according to `org-latex-pdf-process', some values do not care much
about the working directory, e.g.,

  "pdflatex -interaction nonstopmode -output-directory %o %f"

but others clearly require the working directory to be the output
directory (note the absence of output directory in the command below)

  "texi2dvi -p -b -V %f"

As a consequence, if we do not set `default-directory' to the output
directory, the latter is broken. Note that if we do, "%o" place-holder
becomes useless as it is always "./".

In a nutshell we can either set default-directory to source/output
directory or leave it as-is. In all cases, it seems to break something
anyway.

I'm Cc'ing Joon Ro since he reported a related issue with
`org-compile-file'.

Comments welcome.


Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Goaziou