[pdftex] Not a bug

Heiko Oberdiek heiko.oberdiek at googlemail.com
Tue May 13 20:14:08 CEST 2014


On 13.05.2014 19:51, Ramón Casares wrote:
> Sorry! You are right, balanced pairs of parentheses
> within a string require no special treatment.
> 
> I was misled by the Jhove verifier and also by the
> explanation of the macro \pdfescapestring in
> "The pdfTEX user manual" November 23, 2010 Rev. 655:
> 
>     \pdfescapestring general text (expandable)
> 
>     Starting from version 1.30.0, pdfTEX provides a mechanism
>     for converting a general text into pdf string.
>     Many characters that may be needed inside such a text
>     (especially parenthesis), have a special meaning
>     inside a pdf string object and thus, can’t be used literally.
>     The primitive replaces each special pdf character
>     by its literal representation by inserting a backslash
>     before that character. Some characters (e. g. space) are
>     also converted into 3--digit octal number. In example,
>     \pdfescapestring{Text (1)} will be expanded
>     to Text\040\(1\). This ensures a literal interpretation
>     of the text by the pdf viewer. The primitive was
>     introduced in pdfTEX 1.30.0.

Strictly only unbalanced parentheses need to be escaped. But it
simplifies the code a great deal, if it does not have to
check for balanced parentheses to exclude them from escaping.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko Oberdiek





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