[XeTeX] Fwd: MetaPost with XeTeX

[Jonathan Kew]

On 11 May 2006, at 9:35 am, Hans Hagen wrote:

> Otared Kavian wrote:
>> which contains a strange ^^M at the beginning of many lines (if I am
>> not mistaken ^^M means a carriage return?).
> according to taco hoekwater, the following code should be removed  
> from xetex:
>
>  if s < 32 then begin
>         { control char: ^^X }
>         print_visible_char("^"); print_visible_char("^");
>         print_visible_char(s+64);
>  end ...


Possibly; it depends whether we want XeTeX to show control chars  
using the ^^ convention, the way TeX does. I'm not sure why/how  
ConTeXt is generating this stuff.... does it mean \newlinechar is not  
set correctly? Given that as literal characters, the control  
character codes are invisible/indistinguishable in most fonts/editors/ 
etc., I'm not sure if I want to lose the ability to make them  
"visible" in this way.

For example, I sometimes write macros that depend on characters such  
as <TAB> to delimit arguments (if they're reading data in a tab- 
delimited format); the fact that <TAB> shows up as ^^I in the console  
(e.g., error messages) is very helpful in recognizing the distinction  
(critical to TeX when it scans the text) between <TAB> and <SPACE>.

Similarly, ^^M is sometimes used, and again, making it visible can be  
pretty helpful.

Is this what the "-8bit" option in TeX/Web2C is about? I guess it  
should be possible to support this, so that you can choose whether to  
make the control chars visible as ^^ sequences or leave them alone.  
Would that be helpful?

JK