kpathsea: Unable to find files
8.5.1 Unable to find files
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If a program complains it cannot find fonts (or other input files), any
of several things might be wrong. In any case, you may find the
debugging options helpful. ⇒Debugging.
* Perhaps you simply haven't installed all the necessary files; the
basic fonts and input files are distributed separately from the
programs. ⇒unixtex.ftp.
* You have (perhaps unknowingly) told Kpathsea to use search paths
that don't reflect where the files actually are. One common cause
is having environment variables set from a previous installation,
thus overriding what you carefully set in 'texmf.cnf' (⇒
Supported file formats). System '/etc/profile' or other files
such may be the culprit.
* Your files reside in a directory that is only pointed to via a
symbolic link, in a leaf directory and is not listed in 'ls-R'.
Unfortunately, Kpathsea's subdirectory searching has an
irremediable deficiency: If a directory D being searched for
subdirectories contains plain files and symbolic links to other
directories, but no true subdirectories, D will be considered a
leaf directory, i.e., the symbolic links will not be followed.
⇒Subdirectory expansion.
You can work around this problem by creating an empty dummy
subdirectory in D. Then D will no longer be a leaf, and the
symlinks will be followed.
The directory immediately followed by the '//' in the path
specification, however, is always searched for subdirectories, even
if it is a leaf. Presumably you would not have asked for the
directory to be searched for subdirectories if you didn't want it
to be.
* If the fonts (or whatever) don't already exist, 'mktexpk' (or
'mktexmf' or 'mktextfm') will try to create them. If these rather
complicated shell scripts fail, you'll eventually get an error
message saying something like 'Can't find font FONTNAME'. The best
solution is to fix (or at least report) the bug in 'mktexpk'; the
workaround is to generate the necessary fonts by hand with
Metafont, or to grab them from a CTAN site (⇒unixtex.ftp).
* There is a bug in the library. ⇒Reporting bugs.
Info Catalog
kpathsea: Common problems
kpathsea: Slow path searching