[XeTeX]   in XeTeX

[Chris Travers]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 2:43 PM, Mike Maxwell <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu> wrote:
> On 11/14/2011 4:56 PM, Zdenek Wagner wrote:



> 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).

Would you be opposed to requiring an on-switch which would be required
before unicode whitespace characters acquire special meaning?  The
nice thing about an on-switch is one can comment it out for debugging
purposes.

>
>> 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

Most color coding on text editors affects things other than
whitespace.  I think color coding whitespace will be visually
problematic.

> 2) using a font that has a representation of these code points

Ok, so we'd have to use a spacial font to display things *instead of whitespace*

> 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)

But you are still hunting here.
>
> Again, this is not about _forcing_ anyone to use NBSP etc., it is about
> _allowing_ their use *with the expected Unicode behavior.*

Hence my proposal to require enabling it as an optional feature,
rather than making it the default behavior.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers