[XeTeX] Strange problem with 0.996 and 0.9995 xetex and File Names.

[George N. White III]

On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 8:34 AM, Peter Dyballa<Peter_Dyballa at web.de> wrote:
>
> Am 05.09.2009 um 13:06 schrieb Apostolos Syropoulos:
>
>> $ xelatex "test II"
>> Segmentation Fault (core dumped)
>> $ xelatex test\ II.tex
>> This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.2-0.9995.0 (TeX Live 2009)
>> entering extended mode
>> (./test II.tex
>> LaTeX2e <2005/12/01>
>
>
> This is *really* fascinating! I changed the shell I was working in from tcsh
> to bash (2.05b.0(1)-release (powerpc-apple-darwin8.0)) – and for me xelatex
> crashes whenever I pass "file name.tex" (with extension) to the programme...
> It runs OK when I don't give the extension.
>
> I wouldn't trust born again folks and things!

Not sure this is the problem, but in a unicode environment,
a space is not always space:

Regular <SPACE> (0x20)
$ echo story II.tex | od -x
0000000 7473 726f 2079 4949 742e 7865 000a
0000015

xetex works using this spelling, but:

Non-breaking space: <NBSP> in UTF-8 (0xc2 0xa0)
$ echo story II.tex | od -x
0000000 7473 726f c279 49a0 2e49 6574 0a78
0000016
$ xetex 'story II.tex'
This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.2-0.9995.0 (TeX Live 2009)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
! I can't find file `story II.tex'.
<*> story II.tex

(Press Enter to retry, or Control-D to exit)
Please type another input file name:

The <NBSP> character is sometimes displayed as a <SPACE>,
sometimes as an underscore.  There are a number of other
spacy characters in unicode.

I do a lot of work with Fortran, and have encountered problems working
in unicode environments.  MS PowerShell can "run" simple unix scripts with
minimal editing, but the redirection operators (defined as aliases) convert
text to unicode, which results in files that fortran doesn't read correctly.

btw -- I notice miktex xetex replaces <SPACE> with "*" in the name of
the pdf file:

C:\>xelatex "test II.tex"
This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.2-0.999.7 (MiKTeX 2.7)
entering extended mode
("test II.tex"
LaTeX2e <2005/12/01>
Babel <v3.8l> and hyphenation patterns for english, dumylang, nohyphenation, ge
rman, ngerman, german-x-2009-06-19, ngerman-x-2009-06-19, french, loaded.
("C:\SGSP\Tools\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\latex\base\article.cls"
Document Class: article 2005/09/16 v1.4f Standard LaTeX document class
("C:\SGSP\Tools\MiKTeX 2.7\tex\latex\base\size10.clo")) ("test II.aux")
[1] ("test II.aux") )
Output written on test*II.pdf (1 page).  <----------------------- why the "*"?
Transcript written on "test II.log".


-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia