[latexrefman-discuss] Fwd: REVIEW REQUEST - user manual generation

Vincent Belaïche vincent.belaiche at domain.hid
Tue May 10 10:24:48 CEST 2016


Hello,

See below...

Le 09/05/2016 21:27, Gavin Smith a écrit :
> On 9 May 2016 at 20:21, Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123 at domain.hid> wrote:
>
>>> I guess that with all those changes, but except for the space that is a
>>> deep tex engine limitation, only the Devil could find a valid filename
>>> not working.
>>>
>>>    Vincent.
>>>
>
> I was going to say, I don't think it's important to support spaces in
> filenames. (texi2dvi "My Manual.texi" won't work, for example.) The
> main problem is spaces in higher-level directories, but they shouldn't
> be a problem any more now we use absolute paths less. I'd say that
> supporting unusual filenames isn't important. There was already
> support for tildes (~) in filenames (Debian used them for some
> reason), but the other characters are easy to avoid by avoiding using
> them in the filename. Nonetheless it's good that you found a way to
> support them - it makes texi2dvi slightly more robust for unexpected
> circumstances. It's good that much of this code isn't used if the
> filename doesn't contain any unusual characters; this reduces the
> likelihood of something breaking.

I definitely 200% support your point that we should not change the
simple \input FILENAME way when there is no need for that. So, I have
modified the patch so that the condition to trigger the complex way is
that the filename contain TeX special character, previously that
condition was that the filename contains non-alphanumeric characters
which is far broader.

In a nutshell, if the filename contains only alphanumeric or '+' or '-',
the new patch will just \input FILENAME, but if the filename contains
'%' or '#', then it will use the TeX tricks.

I also fixed some comments and added '_' into the list of handled TeX
special characters, for consistency with handling also '$'. Modern tex
engines seem to already do appropriate catcoding for the math special
char ($_^) but this behaviour is unspecified, so good to have this
explicitely.

  Vincent.

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