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feature request: latex in WSL support on windows

Open JeroenvO opened this issue 4 months ago • 1 comments

On windows, be able to use pdflatex in WSL (linux subsystem in windows) as latex compiler.

I tried using a bat-file with: wsl pdflatex name this file pdflatex.bat and put it in a folder that is in $PATH

IPE then recognizes pdflatex in linux, but compilation never finishes, i suspect because the output folder cannot be found. Maybe because the WSL uses different path names than windows, it has a prepended /mnt/c/ for C:.

JeroenvO avatar Aug 13 '25 12:08 JeroenvO

When Ipe runs Latex on Windows, it creates a temporary source file ipetemp.tex in the Latex directory (see Help -> show configuration, it's typically /users/username/Local Settings/Application Data/ipe) and a batch file runlatex.bat in the same directory.

The contents of runlatex.bat looks like this:

chcp 65001
C:
cd "C:\users\otfried\Local Settings\Application Data\ipe\"
pdflatex ipetemp.tex

As you can see, it only passes the short relative pathname to pdflatex.

Can you try running this batch file directly, from a Windows cmd.exe shell?

Your description sounds like perhaps wsl pdflatex only starts the Latex compilation, but doesn't actually wait for the result. You could test this by adding to your pdflatex.bat a sleep command that waits, say, 10 secs, before it returns.

otfried avatar Sep 15 '25 20:09 otfried