[XeTeX] what does this imply?

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 12 avr. 06 à 12:01, Jonathan Kew a écrit :

> If someone wants to follow up, I have a comment. Looking at the  
> files included with gwTeX, it seems that the url.sty file installed  
> for xetex was simply converted from MacRoman or Latin1 or whatever  
> into UTF-8 encoding. This means the modified version works with  
> XeTeX, but would fail with standard LaTeX, which would see two  
> bytes where it expects a single character. A better solution would  
> be to replace the (non-portable) literal 8-bit characters with  
> their (portable) ^^xx representations, which all versions of TeX  
> can read.

 From my impression, the whole concept of url.sty is somehow flawed  
and would need some reworking to play nicer to standard 8-bit LaTeX:  
most of the characters given special meaning by url.sty are taken  
from math fonts (for example ~ is taken from the math $\sim$),  
whereas LaTeX introduces control sequences (such as \textasciitilde)  
which are then defined based on the actual encoding (OT1, T1, LY1,  
etc.). Ideally, with XeLaTeX these sequences would even depend on the  
Unicode definitions inside xunicode.sty.

Bruno Voisin