[XeTeX] Conflict between xunicode and fontspec?

[Will Robertson]

On 07/02/2008, at 7:51 AM, Julien ÉLIE wrote:

>> instead, it is quite legitimate for
>> Polyglossia-French to require users to type the exclamation marks  
>> just
>> after the last word with no space
>
> Do you mean that I would have to write "Ah bon?" *only* when I use  
> XeLaTeX?

That would indeed be inconvenient. It's troubling (to me) how many  
language-specific ways there might be of writing even relatively plain  
texts.

Anyway, I'm sure this won't be a problem. Even if x00A0 is defined  
active, it can still be removed so that polyglossia can do its job:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\catcode`\ =\active
\let ~
a \unskip b
\end{document}

(Who knows if those non-breaking spaces will make it through. Anyway,  
you get the idea.)

On a final note, Arthur wrote:

> Of course, active characters have always had a
> rather bad reputation in TeX

Only when they're not expected :) For example, no-one has a problem  
with the active character ~.

In classical TeX, there's simply too few characters to be able to  
combine syntax and semantics for more than a couple of ascii  
characters -- and the macros were never designed to sanitise their  
inputs (no doubt due to quite legitimate performance concerns).

For example, it would be nice to make ` active so you can write  
`quoted text` and have the quotes render correctly and check their  
nesting (e.g. see the csquotes package). But then you'd better be  
really careful about writing code like \catcode`\x !

In short, characters can be made active to enforce their unicode  
meaning. I even make — (emdash) active so it inserts the right about  
of (breaking and no-breaking) space around it; although interchartoks  
will soon make this the wrong way of doing that sort of thing.

It would be really nice to have an editor which replaced the  
essentially invisible unicode spaces, breaks, and joins with distinct  
coloured symbols (and gave shortcuts to type them, maybe). Consider  
this a request for anyone's upcoming TeX editor :)

Will
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