[tex-live] Bug#571679: moving ucs back to -recommended
Zdenek Wagner
zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Wed Mar 10 18:38:50 CET 2010
2010/3/10 Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>:
> On Mi, 10 Mär 2010, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
>> unicode-based engines good, 8-bit engines (tex, pdftex,...) bad.
>
> Well, so many things have been done with 8-bit engines, so I
> would not say bad, but space for improvement ;-)
>
Time for change. The inputenc package makes use of active characters
and multibyte characters come in pieces. If your macro contains
\futurelet\somechar\dosomething then \somechar may contain a part of a
character. another example, suppose that you redefine \chapter so that
it changes the first character into an initial by:
\def\PutInitial#1{\global\everypar{}%
% code for putting #1 as an initial
}
\everypar{\PutInitial}
Now #1 may contain just a part of a character and using this part will
cause an error. That's why I cannot use inputenc even with Czech, I
need above mentioned constructs in my LaTeX macros and the same macro
must work both with accented and non-accented characters. Moreover,
non-accented characters can be compared by \if, multibyte characters
and active characters cannot.
>> in the words of the advertising twaddle: you _know_ it makes sense.
>
> Yes I know, and I agree. but still we are a long long way from
> replacing pdftex with luatex.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Norbert
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Norbert Preining preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
> JAIST, Japan TU Wien, Austria Debian TeX Task Force
> DSA: 0x09C5B094 fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76 A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
--
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
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