[XeTeX] Hyperref \hyperlink and \hypertarget not working with accented characters

mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca
Wed Nov 2 13:55:21 CET 2011


On Wed, 2 Nov 2011, Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
> Fortunately, FMi and others were able to convince
> him that he was wrong, whence TeX 3.  Now we clearly
> need to start on Adobe (and Heiko !).

If Ross Moore's and other recent technical postings are to be believed,
this is a non-issue.  The file format already allows arbitrary byte
sequences in the field we're talking about, on top of the fact that that
field isn't exposed to readers and doesn't limit the language of
documents at all.

If the ASCII link anchor limitation existed in PDF it would be not much
different from the genuine limitation that object ID numbers must be
integers even if you would prefer to make them text.  Link anchors are
internal codes; they are not text at all, and it's not reasonable to
demand that they must be UTF-8-encoded text in particular.

But PDF doesn't actually limit link anchors to ASCII anyway.  As far as
PDF is concerned (according to recent postings on this list) you can use
UTF-8.  The fact that you can't do that with TeX is TeX's fault, and
relates to the issue Heiko Oberdiek described that TeX can't write
arbitrary byte sequences in all contexts.  He also suggested some possible
workarounds that someone could implement if it were important to do so;
but it really isn't.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/


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