[XeTeX]   in XeTeX

[Tobias Schoel]

Am 13.11.2011 20:25, schrieb Zdenek Wagner:
> 2011/11/13 Tobias Schoel<liesdiedatei at googlemail.com>:
>>
>>
>> Am 13.11.2011 12:35, schrieb Zdenek Wagner:
>>>
>>> 2011/11/13<mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>:
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, 13 Nov 2011, Petr Tomasek wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> make ~ not active when writing my own macros because it contradicts
>>>>> the Unicode standard...)
>>>>
>>>> Isn't it just as much a "contradiction" of the "standard" for \ to do
>>>> what \ does?  I don't think that is a good way to decide what TeX's
>>>> input format should be.
>>>> --
>>>
>>> And how about math and tables in TeX? And I would like to know a good
>>> text editor that visually displays U+00a0 in such a way that I can
>>> easily distinguish it from U+0020. If I canot see the difference, I
>>> can never be sure. And I definitely do not want to use hexedit for my
>>> TeX files.
>>
>> That is a good question. It's close to a question I asked earlier on this
>> list:
>>
>> How much text flow control mechanism should be done by none-ASCII
>> characters? Unicode has different codepoints for signs with the same meaning
>> but different text flow control (space vs. non-break space). So text flow
>> could be controled via Unicode codepoints. But should it? Or should text
>> flow be controled via commands and active characters?
>>
>> One opinion says, that using (La)TeX is programming. Consequently, each
>> character used should be visually well distinguishable. This is not the case
>> with all the Unicode white space characters.
>>
>> One opinion says, that using (La)TeX is transforming plain text (like .txt)
>> in well formatted text. Consequently, the plain text may contain as much
>> (meta)-information as possible and these information should be used when
>> transforming it to well formatted text. So Unicode white space characters
>> are allowed and should be valued by their specific meaning.
>>
> (La)TeX source file is not a plain text. Every LaTeX document nowadays
> starts with \documentclass but such text is not present in the output.

Of course, the preamble isn't plain text, but mostly macros. I thought 
of the body of the document. I think, it's common practice for larger 
documents to have a main latex file, which reads \documentclass … 
\begin{document}\input{first_chapter}\input{second_chapter}…\end{document}
In these cases, the input documents are more or less plain text 
(depending on the subject).

> Even XML is not plain text, you can use entities as ,' and
> many more. Of course, if (La)TeX is used for automatic processing of
> data extracted from a database that can contain a wide variety of
> Unicode character, it is a valid question how to handle such input.
Or if the content is copy-pasted, from let's say HTML. But who would do 
that …

>>>
>>>> Matthew Skala
>>>> mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
>>>> http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/
>>>>
>>>>
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