[XeTeX] Space characters and whitespace

[mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Thu, 3 Mar 2011, enrico.gregorio at univr.it wrote:
> > \newunicodechar{^^^^2009}{\,\hspace{0pt}}
> > \newunicodechar{^^^^202f}{\,}
>
> Of course it works.
>
> The main purpose of the package is indeed to use the "real char". Actually
> those who don't know how to input it will never use the packages to define
> an action for that character, will they? ;-)

Even though users of the package would obviously be people capable of
typing the characters (because otherwise they'd have no reason to use the
package), it might be preferable to use the ^^^^ quoting syntax to specify
the characters in the package code instead of using the Unicode characters
themselves, because the package code could get sent through ASCII-only
email, printed out and typed back in, etc.  That would especially be the
case for spaces, which aren't easy to identify unambiguously on sight.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/