[XeTeX] Handling of the ^^-input

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Wed, 8 Oct 2008 21:52:53 +0530 schrieb Jonathan Kew:

> So to input the Unicode character for the Euro sign using ^^ notation  
> in XeTeX, you need ^^^^20ac, regardless of the \XeTeXinputencoding.  
> And the € character in input will be mapped to U+20AC if (and only if)  
> you set the appropriate \XeTeXinputencoding.
> 
> To make xetex behave as much like pdftex as possible, you can use  
> \XeTeXinputencoding "bytes". This gives a "straight-through" mapping  
> where the byte codes 0..255 become the Unicode codepoints U+0000..U 
> +00FF. This would let you read arbitrary byte data and get the same  
> numeric character codes as with pdftex. Just remember that it won't be  
> valid Unicode! (In general, I wouldn't recommend doing this: if you  
> want to work with text and fonts that use 8-bit, non-Unicode  
> encodings, don't bother with xetex at all.)

No, I didn't want xetex to behave as much like pdftex as possible. That
doesn't make much sense not to use the features of xetex ;-)

I asked about ^^ first because I ran into a bug in luatex connected to
^^00 and tried to understand what was going on. And second because I
want to write some small commands that replace the input handling of ß,€
etc when used together with T1 or TS1-encoded fonts. It is good news
that ^^^^20ac will mean the € regardless of the encoding. 


-- 
Ulrike Fischer