[tex-live] texlive2008 install-tl fails on Windows XP Chinese traditional

[Reinhard Kotucha]

Nien-Po Chen writes:
 > To whom it may concern,
 > 
 > I cannot find any other e-mail addresses to report this problem, so I  
 > send it to you. I wold like to install TeXLive 2008 to Windows XP  
 > (Chinese traditional).  The installer stops, as shown in the attached  
 > screen shots.  It seems the installer cannot handle the folder names  
 > (in traditional Chinese) properly and fails in mkdir.  Any  
 > suggestion?  Thanks.

Hi,
another Chinese reported a similar problem with TeX Live 2007 which
had a completely different installer.  In order to avoid the problem
in TeX Live 2008, I sent him a program which converted an environment
variable containing a path into a list of bytes in hexadecimal
notation and asked him to send me the result back.

But the result was discouraging.  I had not been able to find out
which character encoding had been used.  The string contained a path
where one directory contained his name, a single Chinese character.
This character was represented by two bytes while the rest of the
string ("C:\Documents and Settings\...") had been single-byte ASCII
characters.

The problem is that Perl expects forward slashes as directory
separators.  Thus, if a path is entered in one of the menus or it's
taken from an environment variable, backslashes have to be converted
to forward slashes.  The only character encoding I'm aware of which
allows such a conversion without breaking multi-byte characters is
UTF-8.

About a year ago I discussed this issue with Hans Hagen.  He assumed
that, though Windows probably uses UTF-8 for file names internally,
the user interfaces are using character encodings based on national
standards.  This explains the result of our test.  He suggested to
convert file names to short names (Siep mentioned it already too).
Then a path containing East Asian characters will be converted to a
string containing ASCII characters only.  However, this is not always
possible because some programs have to determine how they had been
invoked.  In this case short names are not usable.

I'm sad that I can't provide better news.  I even don't know whether
this problem can be solved at all.  Maybe a Perl/Windows expert from
East Asia could provide more information.

At the moment, all I can recommend is to install TeX Live in a
directory which doesn't contain multi-byte (East Asian) characters in
its path.  It's definitely not a solution because on Vista you'll
certainly are not allowed to install TeX Live in a directory of your
choice.

Is there anybody who is experienced with Perl on Windows in China,
Japan, or Korea who can provide more information?

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
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