[XeTeX]   in XeTeX

[Zdenek Wagner]

2011/11/14 Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
>
>
> Keith J. Schultz wrote:
>
>> So, Unicode needs an editor to be displayed correctly.
>
> Why ?  Not meant to sound aggressive, but seems a very
> odd assertion, IMHO. Editors are for changing things;
> why would you need a program intended to change things
> just to display Unicode ?
>
>> Now, for the youngsters XML, TeX, HTML are per definition plain text
>> files.
>
> No, they are text files, not /plain/ text files.  Look
> at some mime types :
>
>        text/plain (for plain text)
>        text/html (for HTML)
>
It's not the encoding that determines whether it is a plain text.
Texts in ISO 8859-1, CP852, UTF-8, UTF-16, BIG-5 can be plain texts.
LTR/RTL is no problem in modern editors, I can easily combine
Czech/English/Hindi/Urdu (uses arabic script) in a single document,
the languages/scripts may even be mixed within a paragraph. What
determines whether it is or is not a plain text is the presence or
absence of control characters or commands no matter whether the file
can be viewed and/or edited in a plain text editor such as vim or
notepad. If I type < I wish it to mean "less that" but in XML it marks
the element tag, If I need such a character in XML or SGML, I have to
write < no matter what editor I use. If it were plain text, <
would mean ampersand followed by the letters lt and a semicolon. If I
type & in a plain text, it means "and". If I type it in a TeX file, it
is a special character for \halign (unless \catcode is changed), in
XML and SGML it means that all following characters up to the first
semicolon is an entity name. If I have to insert an ampersand, I have
to write \& in TeX or & in XML and SGML. There are different
methods how to enter A, eg ^^41 in TeX or A in XML and SGML. As
Phil wrote, there is a clearly defined MIME type for a plain text.

> Philip Taylor
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz