[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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