Zathura fails for symbolic links (physical vs. absolute logical paths)

[mms-neuro]

Description

This is an observation I made - I found ways to get around it, but it might be interesting to fix it anyways.

If a tex-document is compiled in a directory with symbolic links in the path (and opened by that absolute path in the command) and should be opened with Zathura, zathura could try to open the file in the wrong directory.

Steps to reproduce

The issue is probably a problem of how the paths are handled (and how symbolic links work on linux) and therefore mainly dependent on the file-structure. It should work with any minimal configuration, provided that let g:vimtex_view_method = 'zathura' (or minimal) is set.

Directory setting (bash)

My setting is quite complex, but I think this is the essence of the problem:
In practice, a device should of course be mounted.

cd /home/myusername/
mkdir /mnt/mydrive/
ln -s /mnt/mydrive 
cd mydrive
nvim /home/myusername/mydrive/test.tex

Then paste minimal example, write file and compile.

Call :VimxtexView

Comments on the setting

Vimtex-Root

If I call (in /home/myusername/mydrive)
nvim test.tex, then the Vimtex-Root is /mnt/mydrive/
If I use nvim /home/myusername/mydrive/test.tex, then the Vimtex-Root for the same file is /home/myusername/mydrive (using the symbolic link).

Note, that in that case, :pwd and !pwd return different paths, the first the physical path /mnt/mydrive (can be called in bash by pwd -P) and the second one the 'logical path' /home/myusername/mydrive (pwd -L).

Problems in Vimtex:

• I think at that place there have been issues before ( Reverse and forward search with zathura suddenly stopped working #2573 Vimtex is not using full path anymore when calling synctex  #2575) - the actual problem starts at

  vimtex/autoload/vimtex/view/zathura.vim

  Line 55 in f9b19d0

  \ . vimtex#util#shellescape(vimtex#paths#relative(a:outfile, getcwd()))

  • In the second case (nvim /home/myusername/mydrive/test.tex), outfile will be /home/myusername/mydrive/test.pdf, while getcwd() will be /mnt/mydrive/. The result is then something like ../../home/home/myusername/mydrive/test.pdf (not sure about the exact numers of .., but the problem is the double home:

Expected behavior

Zathura window opens and shows test.pdf

Actual behavior

Zathura document opens and shows no file (tries to open the file in the wrong directory).

Do you use a latexmkrc file?

No

VimtexInfo

Hope the problem is clear like that.

[mms-neuro]

There are several options to adress this problem:

1. Using absolute paths for zathura
2. Use something like :resolve to resolve symbolic links for root/the file-names
3. Adapt vimtex#paths#relative so that it returns the right relative path in that situation.
   I think the complexity of the possible approaches is increasing with the numbers ;)

[lervag]

Thanks, this is a very good bug report. To be honest, this almost feels like a bug with Vim/neovim itself. In the case where we use the absolute path, it seems that expand('%:p') resolves differently during vimtex initialization and after vimtex is initialized.

I could add let l:main = resolve(l:main) here:

vimtex/autoload/vimtex/state.vim

Line 17 in f9b19d0

let [l:main, l:main_parser, l:unsupported_modules] = s:get_main()

However, I think it is a bad idea. E.g., if you were to do ln -s test.tex foo.tex, then I believe you expect VimTeX to respect it. If I resolve the main file, then we will always ignore that type of link.

But we could resolve only the root part. I believe that makes more sense and may be an easy fix here.

[lervag]

I believe it is fixed now.