[XeTeX] xelatex and perltex: incompatibility?

[Nickkk]

Hi

There seems to be some incompatibility between perltex and xelatex over the 
use of pipes.  But I might be making a basic mistake.

I asked Scott Pakin, the perltex creator, if there might be an incompatibility 
between the two.


This is the problem:

I'm using the latest perltex 1.5.  I'm using the texlive package from debian 
testing.

I used two different documents, including a very minimal:

==============================

\documentclass[12pt]{report}
%\usepackage{xltxtra,fontspec,xunicode}
\usepackage{perltex}
%\setmainfont{Myriad Pro}
\perlnewcommand{\Hello}
{
	return "goodbye, cruel world";
}
\begin{document}
	\Hello
\end{document}

==============================

(the problem also reproduces with xltxtra,fontspec,xunicode, and Myriad Pro.)


It works fine with pdflatex.
It works fine with xelatex, so long as I have not used \perlnewcommand.

But with xelatex as the latex command, and using \perlnewcommand in the 
preamble. ( perltex --latex=xelatex test.tex )

I get this error:

==============
 LaTeX Error: Missing \begin{document}.

See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
 ...

l.1 n
     dinput
?             
==============

AND I get two or more "ndinput"s in the pdf before the actual contents of the 
command, which otherwise seems to have worked fine.

Interestingly, if I put the command after \begin{document} I don't get the 
error, but I do get the "ndinput"s.



Scott Pakin's response:

> I haven't used XeLaTeX myself, but your minimal \perlnewcommand call
> looks correct -- especially given that it works with pdflatex.  Yours
> is the first report I've received of problems with PerlTeX+XeLaTeX
> although I have heard that one of my other packages also has problems
> with XeLaTeX (a completely different problem from yours, however).
>
> ...
>
> Strange.  Something certainly seems awry with xelatex's processing of
> \endinput.  It's like it's discarding the "\e" then trying to typeset
> the "ndinput".  If you create a file that ends with an \endinput line
> and \input that into your main document, does xelatex process the
> \endinput correctly?
>
> Do things improve with PerlTeX if you replace the line
>
>     if (!eval {mkfifo($pipe, 0600)}) {
>
> in perltex.pl with
>
>     if (1) {
>
> ?  I'm wondering if xelatex handles named pipes differently from how
> pdflatex does.  The preceding change disables PerlTeX's named-pipe
> support.


I had a go at making the file that ends in \endinput, but it seems to choke in 
the same way.

When I amended the perltex file, it ran smoothly on this, and on a more 
complex document.

Scott Pakin thought people on this list would have a good insight into how 
xelatex handles pipes:

> Ask if there's anything unusual about the way xelatex
> reads files that could be expected to break named pipes.  In the
> meantime, I suppose I should add a --nopipe command-line option to
> perltex for the sake of xelatex users.


Any comments?

(thanks in advance for your help)

Nick
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