[XeTeX] Handling of the ^^-input

Ulrike Fischer news2 at nililand.de
Wed Oct 8 17:15:58 CEST 2008


Am Wed, 8 Oct 2008 18:46:29 +0530 schrieb Jonathan Kew:

>> I wanted to know some details about how xetex handles them (to know if
>> code which use ^^hh will always give the same results with pdftex and
>> xetex).
> 
> ^^hh will always give you the character with code "hh", in both xetex  
> and pdftex; 

It's the "character with code 'hh'"-concept I'm struggling with. 

^^45 is a "E" in pdftex and xetex. But ^^e4 (ä in Latin1) doesn't have
an intrinsic "character" meaning for pdftex but for xetex it is probably
connected to the unicode char with the meaning "ä". And I'm wondering
what are the practical consequences (apart from some obvious things with
fonts). 


After some thought I at least found this example (a ansinew file):

\XeTeXinputencoding "cp1252"
\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{book}
\begin{document}
\catcode`\€=\active
\def€{EuroSign}

\catcode`\^^80=\active
\def^^80{Roof notation}
€ ^^80

\end{document}

When run with LaTeX (without the \XeTeXinputencoding line) the
definition of ^^80 overwrites the definition of €. With xetex € and ^^80
give different results.  € is no longer accessible through the ^^80
notation with xetex (in 8-bit files), you must use ^^^^20ac instead. 



-- 
Ulrike Fischer 



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