[tex-live] packages with characters > 127

[Zdenek Wagner]

2010/1/1 Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>:
>    i've had trouble contacting the authors, too (i think sebastian rahtz
>    has now retired, so don't bother him -- i think his last ever work on
>    tex was tug 2000 in oxford.
>
> Sebastian was the principal perpetrator of TL for a couple more years
> after that.  It was only a couple months ago that he finally
> (and reluctantly) asked me to take him off this list.
>
> At any rate, fvrb-ex.dtx was evidently written by Denis Girou.  I'll
> write Denis and Sebastian now.  I can't imagine they will object to
> using ^^.
>
If I were the author I would not agree. Using ^^ is nothing but a
cryptic way of reaching the same result. Why don't you ask the authors
to write ^^5c^^70^^61^^72^^20 instead of \par? These are exactly the
same tokens (and you may add many more spaces or ^^20 or mixture of
them, TeX will not see them after a control sequence). Now what is the
meaning of ^^dd? It is the character with decimal code 221 in SOME
ENCODING. But which encoding? Nobody knows. If you open a file with
8-bit characters in a text editor, you will most likely see whether
the characters look OK or whether you see garbage. You can try iconv
to convert the file and if you have luck, you find in which encoding
the file was. If the file contains ^^dd, you know nothing. You may
convert it by iconv from any encoding to anything else, but you will
still see ^^dd. Using cryptic 8-bit encoding instead of human readable
8-bit encoding makes no sense.

>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz