[XeTeX] what does this imply?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 12 Apr 2006, at 3:51 am, Tom Sgouros wrote:

>
> Hello all:
>
> I have just installed XeTeX, but not very successfully.  I have a fink
> version of teTeX, and had difficulty generating a xelatex.fmt file.
> I've got one now, but I generated it by invoking fmtutil by hand and
> copying it into the right place, so I'm not really confident of it.
>
> Anyway, some things work ok, but the url.sty package (included by
> hyperref.sty which is used by XeTeX-notes.tex) generates this error:
> ....

I think this is because the url.sty file includes a bunch of 8-bit  
characters which cannot be properly interpreted as UTF-8, which is  
how XeTeX (by default) reads input text. Gerben's TeX package  
includes a modified version of url.sty where the 8-bit characters  
have been converted to Unicode, so that XeTeX loads it OK.

It might work to open url.sty with an editor such as TextWrangler  
that lets you work with encodings, and then save a new copy of it  
using UTF-8; then put this in a place where XeTeX will find it before  
the original one. With gwTeX, I see the following:

	Kew-PowerBookG4:~ jonathan$ kpsewhich url.sty
	/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/latex/url/url.sty
	Kew-PowerBookG4:~ jonathan$ kpsewhich -progname=xelatex url.sty
	/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.gwtex/xetex/latex/url/url.sty

which shows how two versions of the file are installed, and the  
search paths (from texmf.cnf) mean that xelatex finds the modified  
copy whereas standard latex finds the original. But I don't know how  
the Fink TeX package manages the texmf tree; you may need to adjust  
paths and file locations in some way.

JK