[XeTeX] dealing with $ character

Hans Hagen pragma at wxs.nl
Thu Jul 8 09:58:40 CEST 2004


Bruce D'Arcus wrote:

>
> On Jul 7, 2004, at 1:21 PM, Stephen Moye wrote:
>
>> Then there must be more here than meets the eye because I just 
>> implemented Hans' suggestion in a small project of my own and it 
>> works perfectly.
>
>
> Yeah, turns out I was looking at the wrong xsl file.  Sorry for the 
> noise.
>
> What does this code actually say, just in case I need to deal with 
> other characters this way?
>
> \catcode`\$=12

catcodes are something very texy (but opinions differ on its beauty) 

a character can have one of 16 catcodes and this is how tex can switch states, like

\catcode`\{=1 
\catcode`\}=2 

now tex sees a { as begin of a group; so, this means that you can say

\catcode`\[=1 
\catcode`\]=2 

as well; it also means that - by changing catcodes - you can do all kind of trickery; the downside is that when passed as argument, as in \blabla {.$x$..} the catcode is frozen; this is one of the reason why verbatim is always kind of tricky to handle, because verbatim environments change the catcodes 

so ... $ when it has catcode 3 will tell tex that it has run into something math; you don't want that, so by giving it catcode 12 you tell tex to see it as character 

Hans  



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