[XeTeX] Whitespace in input

[Karljurgen Feuerherm]

I didn't say anything about U+00A0 one way or the other....

Keeping in mind that the purpose of this software is to get work done,
and not to fulfil anyone's philosophical notions of software, my general
feeling is that:

* Xe(La)TeX should support plain text characters--for *my* present
purpose, meaning characters which are printable, pure and simple,
regardless of where in the Unicode space they are; as far as I know,
this is the case now (and my case in point was more or less just aimed
at this issue);

* it should support whatever other characters are necessary to complex
rendering, if it doesn't already;

* optionally it can/could support whatever else, as the in-the-flesh
maintainers of the package have time and leisure to implement.

I said 'feel', because it seems to me all very well for the rest of us
to debate philosophy back and forth, but unless we're doing the actual
work....

As someone has already pointed out, lots of what is in Unicode is there
because it is UNI-code. It may very well have outlived its usefulness,
at least in the context of Xe(La)TeX doing the work one would like it to
do. Just because something is in Unicode doesn't mean one has to want to
use it. In fact, the more unnecessary things one implements, the better
the chance of instability.

There are no doubt multiple ways to achieve this pragmatically stated
goal. I don't feel any vested interest in dictating to anyone the
preference for how to go about it.

K

>>> On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at  2:15 PM, in message
<alpine.LNX.2.00.1111141312201.3696 at tetsu.ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>,
<mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca> wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Nov 2011, Karljurgen Feuerherm wrote:
>> I use U+12000 and above regularly, as a case in point...
>
> Do you think that basic formatting control functions should be bound
to
> code points in that range, as the preferred way of accessing those
> functions?  Let's not lose track of what this discussion is about.
>
> XeTeX can *with appropriate font support* accept nearly any Unicode
point
> in its input.  But very few Unicode points are treated specially by
XeTeX
> as such, and I don't think U+00A0 should be one of them.
> --
> Matthew Skala
> mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
> http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>   http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex