[XeTeX] problems with external figures

[Jonathan Kew]

On 8 May 2007, at 3:14 pm, Hans Hagen wrote:

> Jonathan Kew wrote:
>> On 8 May 2007, at 12:53 pm, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I'm trying to include an image, but the following fails for some
>>> reason:
>>>
>>> {\XeTeXpicfile 'a.jpg'}
>>> \bye
>>>
>>> ! Unable to load picture or PDF file 'a.jpg}'.
>>>
>>
>> You need to ensure there is a space after the filename, to let (Xe)
>> TeX know when to stop reading it. Thus,
>>
>> {\XeTeXpicfile 'a.jpg' }
>> \bye
>>
>> should work. Or you can say \relax there, instead of space.
>>
> so it's \input conformant ; isn't the ' acting as a delimiter?

The quotes act as quotes, allowing you to have spaces in the name;  
but it is possible to have several separately-quoted fragments of  
path/name.ext, so filename scanning does not end at the close-quote,  
it looks beyond for possible continuation of the name.

I believe this is consistent with XeTeX's \input, and with the  
behavior of \input in pdftex et al. XeTeX used to handle it  
differently (if the name was quoted, then the single quoted string  
was taken to be the complete name), but this led to incompatibility  
with some macro packages that assumed filename concatenation across  
quoted chunks.

JK