Hi everyone,

Am I correct in thinking that Forester 4.3.1 removed the functionality
where you could put .sty files in the assets folder to include them in
your tex figures? If so, this is a breaking change that should really
be documented in the release notes page. I couldn't even find this in
the git commit log at git.sr.ht/~jonsterling/ocaml-forester/log/main.

If I'm just wrong about this, please let me know. I feel like I'm going insane.

Best,
Eigil

[Forgot to reply-all! Also added a paragraph to my message.] 

Very sorry about this! I should have documented it, will try to do
better in the future.

We are still considering how best to deal with 
build assets in a way that balances user expectations 
with the need to keep builds relatively independent from 
their environment.

Currently the method we suggest for dealing with this is to
inline your .sty file into a macro and then use that macro. This 
is not a perfect solution because sometimes LaTeX behaves 
differently in a .sty file vs. in a .tex file, but I will be very happy to 
personally help you troubleshoot any problems that are caused by
the changes to Forester 4.3.1.

In the meanwhile, I have opened a ticket so that we can get your use-case
working again in an upcoming release. https://todo.sr.ht/~jonsterling/forester/111

Best,
Jon

I've resolved my problem by updating to a more recent version of
TeXLive which includes the package I'm using (quiver.sty). I don't
really have a strong position on the best way of handling this in
general.

(And I understand that documentation in a rapidly-evolving project
like this is very hard to do perfectly!)

Thanks for a quick response.

Best,
Eigil

On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 10:57 AM Jon Sterling <jon@jonmsterling.com> wrote:
>
> [Forgot to reply-all! Also added a paragraph to my message.]
>
> Very sorry about this! I should have documented it, will try to do
> better in the future.
>
> We are still considering how best to deal with
> build assets in a way that balances user expectations
> with the need to keep builds relatively independent from
> their environment.
>
> Currently the method we suggest for dealing with this is to
> inline your .sty file into a macro and then use that macro. This
> is not a perfect solution because sometimes LaTeX behaves
> differently in a .sty file vs. in a .tex file, but I will be very happy to
> personally help you troubleshoot any problems that are caused by
> the changes to Forester 4.3.1.
>
> In the meanwhile, I have opened a ticket so that we can get your use-case
> working again in an upcoming release. https://todo.sr.ht/~jonsterling/forester/111
>
> Best,
> Jon

I have encountered an issue similar in nature, and this was reported
as part of #82 here:
https://todo.sr.ht/~jonsterling/forester/82#event-382182 .

My solution was to use an environment variable `TEXINPUTS` to tell
LaTeX to also search for LaTeX files, it looks like this in a shell
script (assuming I put my .tex, .sty etc. in `tex` directory alongside
the directory `trees`, you can use `assets` instead ):

```bash
export TEXINPUTS=.:$PROJECT_ROOT/tex/:
```

where $PROJECT_ROOT is the absolute path to the project root, which
can be deduced from the script path like this:

```bash
SCRIPT_DIR=$(dirname "$(readlink -f "$0")")
PROJECT_ROOT="$SCRIPT_DIR"
```

As I'm already using a wrapper script to render my forest instead of
directly calling forester.

Regards,

Utensil Song