Kpathsea: A library for path searching
4. TeX support
Although the basic features in Kpathsea can be used for any type of path
searching, it came about (like all libraries) with a specific
application in mind: I wrote Kpathsea specifically for TeX system
programs. I had been struggling with the programs I was using (Dvips,
Xdvi, and TeX itself) having slightly different notions of how to
specify paths; and debugging was painful, since no code was shared.
Therefore, Kpathsea provides some TeX-specific formats and features.
Indeed, many of the supposedly generic path searching features were
provided because they seemed useful in that conTeXt (font lookup,
particularly).
Kpathsea provides a standard way to search for files of any of the
supported file types; glyph fonts are a bit different than all the rest.
Searches are based solely on filenames, not file contents--if a GF
file is named `cmr10.600pk', it will be found as a PK file.
