no appropriate script or program found: fmtutil

[Yihui Xie]

Thanks, Akira! That's helpful information, and I have learned it for
the first time. I wonder if it's possible for TeX Live to get rid of
this limitation. I don't have the expertise myself, since I'm mainly
an R user. I know that R used to have difficulties with multibyte
characters on Windows, too, but it no longer has problems since
Windows can support native UTF-8 locales. It will be nice if TeX Live
can run regardless of its installation path.

Regards,
Yihui
--
https://yihui.org


On Tue, Nov 7, 2023 at 2:28 AM Akira Kakuto <kakuto at jcom.zaq.ne.jp> wrote:
>
> On 2023/11/07 0:15, Yihui Xie wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Since about three weeks ago, I have been receiving reports that contain the
> > error message "no appropriate script or program found: fmtutil" from
> > Windows users when calling `fmtutil-sys.exe --all`, e.g.,
> > https://github.com/yihui/yihui.org/discussions/1089#discussioncomment-7265373
> > (you can search for the error message on this page to see other similar
> > reports)
> >
> >>From my limited understanding, the error seems to be from this line:
> > https://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/bin/windows/runscript.tlu?revision=68579&view=markup#l864
> > The variable `progname` is `fmtutil` (fmtutil-sys.exe -> fmtutil-sys ->
> > fmtutil), but none of the extensions in `extlist` works because only
> > `fmtutil.exe` exists (but `extlist` doesn't include `.exe`):
> > https://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/bin/windows/ I don't really
> > understand Lua, and I'm not sure if my diagnosis is correct.
> >
> > Another issue that might be relevant (apologies if not) is that calling
> > executables by their short paths (Windows 8+3 names) doesn't work, as I
> > mentioned to Norbert last week:
> > https://github.com/rstudio/tinytex/issues/427#issuecomment-1785546973 That
> > is, executing FMTUTI~1.EXE doesn't work, although it's a valid path name on
> > Windows. In this case, `progname` would be `FMTUTI~1`, which understandably
> > can't be found. If possible, the path should be converted to its canonical
> > form beforehand. I'm not sure if this was a recent change, but I started to
> > receive this type of report only recently.
> >
> > Thanks!
>
> I don't understand details, but I can say one thing.
> TeX Live for Windows does not support install directory
> with non-ascii characters, that is, install directory
> name should be 7bit ascii. Thus, TeX Live for Windows
> installed under c:/Users/username/..., where username
> contains non-ascii characters, does not work.
> WORKAROUND:
> (1) open a command prompt window as an administrator
> (2) go to c:\Users :
>      cd /d c:\Users
> (3) create a symbolic link of username:
>      mklink /D newname username
>      here, newname is a suitable name with 7bit ascii
>      characters without spaces
> (4) change username by newname for TeX Live binaries
>      in PATH variable :
>      C:\Users\newname\AppData\Roaming\TinyTeX\bin\windows
>
> Best,
> Akira