[XeTeX]   in XeTeX

[Mike Maxwell]

On 11/14/2011 4:56 PM, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> 2011/11/14 Mike Maxwell<maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu>:
>> We are not (at least I am not) suggesting that everyone must use
>> the Unicode non-breaking space character, or etc.  What we *are*
>> suggesting is that in Xe(La)Tex, we be *allowed* to use those
>> characters, and that they have their
>
> You are allowed to use them, nothing prevents you.

At least one participant in this thread (or actually the related thread 
"Whitespace in input"--the person in question is 
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca) has said:
 > U+00A0 is an invalid character for TeX input

That sounds pretty much like prevention (although maybe you don't agree 
with him).

But in fact, the last time I tried this, the NBSP character was 
interpreted in the same way as an ASCII space, which is not what I want. 
  What I want (repeating myself again) is for such characters to--
 >> have their Unicode-defined semantics, to the extent that
 >> makes sense in XeTeX.
--just the same as I would expect XeTeX (or xdvipdfmx) to correctly 
handle the visual re-ordering behavior of U+09C7 through U+09CC, or 
U+093F (Devanagari vowel sign I).

 > However, I would not like to think, why I have
 > overful/underful boxes and opening hex editor to see what kind of
 > space is written between words.

A number of alternatives to a hex editor have been pointed out:
1) color coding
2) using a font that has a representation of these code points
3) using any text editor that allows you to see the Unicode code point 
of a character (I use jEdit this way, I'm sure many other editors offer 
this support)

Again, this is not about _forcing_ anyone to use NBSP etc., it is about 
_allowing_ their use *with the expected Unicode behavior.*
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu
	"My definition of an interesting universe is
	one that has the capacity to study itself."
         --Stephen Eastmond