[XeTeX] XeTeX error message

[Jonathan Kew]

Regarding opening documents in TeXShop, the likeliest cause I know of 
for a document appearing to open without text is that you have a legacy 
document in an encoding such as MacRoman, containing characters from 
the upper half of the character set (>0x7F), and you try to open it in 
TeXShop as UTF-8. This is very likely to fail, because there are likely 
to be byte sequences in the legacy text that are not valid UTF-8 
sequences.

I wish TeXShop would give a suitable error message in this situation, 
rather than just silently refusing to read the text, though.

Jonathan

On 26 Apr 2004, at 2:20 pm, Stephen Moye wrote:

> I tried this morning to recreate the problem, but to no avail. Although
> XeTeX might be made more forgiving, I suspect that TeXShop might be 
> part of
> the problem.
>
> If I open a Textures document directly in TeXShop, and Save As... A 
> Mac OSX
> unicode format, save and close the file, and then reopen the it in 
> TeXShop,
> there appears to be no text. If I then open that file in BBEdit (gotta 
> love
> BBEdit), the text is there and the document is in unicode format. In 
> BBEdit,
> by switching off "Include Byte Order Mark" and switching on "UTF-8
> Encoding", saving the document and reopening the file in TeXShop, the 
> text
> reappears.
>
> I have seen some strange behavior in TeXShop by mucking about with the
> encoding of documents. As is the usual way of things, this always 
> seems to
> happen when I am rushing in a mad attempt to get something out the 
> door, so
> the details of the problems are not clear to me. I will say that in 
> almost
> every case, BBEdit has saved the day (zap gremlins, etc).
>
> Once again, the lesson I have learned is either to copy and paste OS9
> documents into a TeXShop document, or to use BBEdit to sanitize an OS9
> document before opening it in TeXShop.
>
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