[XeTeX]   in XeTeX

[Philip TAYLOR]

Keith J. Schultz wrote:
> Hi Phillip,
>
>
> Am 14.11.2011 um 09:36 schrieb Philip TAYLOR:
>
>>
>>
>> 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 ?
> 	Yes, there are other programs for displaying texts. I was thinking about
> 	a unix command such as cat, less, more, etc. Depending on a few things
> 	they will not necessarily display a Unicode text file correctly !
>>
>>> 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)
>
> 	C'mon Phillip! I wrote "per defintion" ! That is the file is plain text.
> 	the plain text "text/html" is for the browser so that it knows a file contains
> 	html-tags/commands and interpret accordingly during display!

Humpty Dumpty might have approved ("When I used a word,"
Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means
just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.")

but I am afraid I cannot.  The definition is /your/ definition,
not the definition of the general community.  Plain text is
plain text, as I wrote long ago in this thread -- it contains
letters, digits, punctuation, special symbols, white space
and ends of line.  By definition (the generally accepted
definition, that is, not a personal idiosyncratic one), none
of those letters, digits, punctuation, special symbols,
white space or ends of line have any special significance,
and certainly no greater significance than they would
have were they to appear (say) printed on a sheet of paper.

As soon as you define any one of those things to have special
significance (as do Runoff, GML, SGML, HTML, XML, TeX, ...),
the document ceases to be plain text and becomes structured
text.

Philip Taylor