[tex-live] Unicode filename problem

[Reinhard Kotucha]

Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard writes:
 > Torsten Ekedahl a écrit :

 > > I've just switched from iso-latin-1 to UTF-8 on my computer. This
 > > has revealed a problem with tex.
 > > 
 > Not really with TeX, I think. Probably more with LaTeX's inputenc
 > and/or something in your system. (So the texhax list may be more
 > appropriate.)

It seems that tex itself has no problems with UTF-8.  But I'm not sure
whether I tested it correctly.

First of all I created a file "testutf.tex":

-----------------------------
\input xäx.tex 
\bye

% Local Variables:
% coding: utf-8
% End
-----------------------------

I loaded it into Emacs again in order to to convince Emacs to read the
"Local Variables" section. Then I created the file xäx.tex:

-----------------------------
#! /usr/bin/env perl
$^W=1;

my $filename="x\xc3\xa4x.tex";

print "$filename\n";

open OUT, ">$filename";
print OUT "hello\n";
close OUT;
-----------------------------

I got:

$ pdftex testutf.tex  
This is pdfTeXk, Version 3.1415926-1.40.9 (Web2C 7.5.7)
 %&-line parsing enabled.
entering extended mode
(./testutf.tex (./xäx.tex) [1{/home/reinhard/.texlive2008/texmf-var/fonts/map/
pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map}] )</reiserfs/texlive/svn/trunk/Master/texmf-dist/font
s/type1/bluesky/cm/cmr10.pfb>
Output written on testutf.pdf (1 page, 4013 bytes).
Transcript written on testutf.log.

So far so good.  I'd like to check things using programs like 'less'
or a program I've written myself, but xterms are so fragile that I
gave it up.  The only reliable program I'm aware of is Emacs.

Could anyone point me to a terminal program which simply works?

Anyway, I'm wondering whther it's a good idea to use non-ASCII
characters in file names at all.  They are only good for headaches if
you copy a file from one machine to another.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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