Bad (or good) interaction between XeLaTeX and Dropbox

[Paulo Ney de Souza]

These days I edit most of my files inside Dropbox, due to cooperation with
other authors.

Every once in a while I meet an error using xelatex which is:

(./main.out) (./main.out) (./main.toc) [1
! I can't write on file `main.pdf'.
(Press Enter to retry, or Control-D to exit; default file extension is
`.pdf')
Please type another file name for output:


and it would just refuse to overwrite (or even write) main.pdf inside the
directory,
no matter what one does, even removing the file entirely.

It does not have anything to do with the TeX source file, I can -- at that
point -- change
to a simple one-liner and xelatex would NOT write the main.pdf file to the
disk. Once
it happens it persists for hours in that particular directory.

Moving the file OUT of Dropbox or changing to either pdfLaTeX or luaLaTeX
solves the problem.

Has anyone seen this? What sort of interaction xeLaTeX have with the file
system that is not performed by pdflatex or lualatex?

Paulo Ney
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