I'm trying to point the location of an image in the cloud (Dropbox) using TeX on Mac OS. The problem is that I require full path name which contains the username (different for both machines). For example the path on machine 1 is: /Users/user_name1/Dropbox/image.pdf
and on the machine 2 it's /Users/user_name2/Dropbox/image.pdf
. In such case, I would have to change the path whenever I'm changing the machine (user) to be able to compile the document.
Is there any way to shorten the path name so that I can point to the files universally on a different machines?
Best Answer
As you are running on a UNIX system, the
~
character can be used to refer to the home directory of the current user. Alternatively, one could also use environmental variables, such as$HOME
or$USER
in the file path (thanks to bloodworks for pointing that out!). However, as~
and$
have special meaning in LaTeX, we need to apply\detokenize
to sanitize the path.