[OS X TeX] possible character-mapping bug in gwTeX

[Maarten Sneep]

On 15 Oct 2005, at 0:09, Christopher Brislawn wrote:

> The problem in documents processed with this setup is that three  
> keyboard characters render to PDF as incorrect glyphs in roman and  
> other font styles, although they render correctly in math and  
> typewriter styles.  The pipe character, |, renders as a dash, while  
> the inequalities, < and >, render as inverted exclamation and  
> inverted question marks, respectively.

[snip]
> The problems also occur when (La)TeX is invoked from the command  
> line, so they don't appear to be due to TeXShop.

They rarely are, so not a real surprise there.

> This *could* be a font encoding problem, but I tried saving the  
> source in various encodings (MacOSRoman, ISO Latin 1, Latin 5, etc.)

It is. In LaTeX, add \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} and the problem  
disappears. How to do this in plain TeX, I don't know.

> and the problem is consistent with all encodings.

*input* encodings, yes (these characters are part of 7-bit US ASCII,  
and happily appear in the same location for all 8-bit encodings).

> I have searched a number of TeX forums and FAQs, including  
> comp.text.tex, macosxtex-archives, gmane.comp.tex.macosx, Maarten  
> Sneep's Mac-Tex-FAQ, etc., but have seen no mention of this  
> problem, which is amazing (and disturbing) since it is making three  
> standard keyboard characters unusable in most font styles.  Is this  
> problem real (i.e., is it reproducible, or am I just going crazy?),

No, I see it (now that you mention it), but I only use those  
characters ever in math mode or verbatim bits, and then there is no  
issue.

> is it specific to the gwTeX distribution, and are there any  
> effective (or planned) solutions?  Forcing all uses of these  
> characters into math mode would be awkward and inconvenient, but I  
> am unable to find any other work-arounds.

Changing the font encoding does help, and apparently Knuth intended  
these characters to be used in math mode only. I'd be very surprised  
if this actually works on other TeX systems.

Maarten
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