On Sunday, 23 July 2017 02:39:47 UTC-5, John MacFarlane wrote:

findExecutable from System.Directory is being used to check
for the existence of the program and issue and error if it's
not found.

The docs for findExecutable say:

> On Windows, findExecutable calls the Win32 function
> SearchPath, which may search other places before checking
> the directories in the PATH environment variable. Where it
> actually searches depends on registry settings, but
> notably includes the directory containing the current
> executable.

So that might be a clue about what's happening.

We could try removing that check and just letting things
fail at the point where we try to run the tex program.
But the check is nice because we can give a more informative
message early on.

Would that be too difficult?

I tried providing a xelatex.exe based on a batch file `pdftex %1 %2 ... ^&pdflatex %n`, with `%n` as the document's name with a bat2exe program, but somehow I miss the correct number of arguments, so the batch job fails.

pdftex %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 ^&pdflatex %8

Or perhaps I'm missing something in the batch file approach.

Confused,