[XeTeX] Whitespace in input

[Keith J. Schultz]

Hi all,

I agree that XeTeX should support all printable characters. 

A non.breaking space is to me a printable character, in so far that
it is important and must be used to distinguish between word space, et all.

To go back in history, one of my pet peeves in LaTeX was that I had to
enter the German characters öäüß as \"o, \"a, etc and later the
short cut forms "s, "u, etc. later with inputenc I finally, could just enter
öäüß.But I had trouble, (actually just needed to convert) my files to and from
apple to windows (so that editing was possible on windows).

Yet, I still had trouble with quoting, so I was force to use \quote, et al.
to have a simple method of quoting properly in english, german and french
in one document! I even modified them to suite some requirements I need and
I had one command. 

Unicode has thankfully change all this. I can forget about using all those TeX
commands for the characters I need. I just type away.

The only problem is now is the keyboard equivalents and how the editor of choice 
displays them.

Xe(La)TeX doe should not need to worry about how I input a non-breaking character
it should just respect it.

Some what off topic : What I would like to see is that when in math mode all I need to
enter is {}[] √∑ in formulas. Sure I could use editor shortcuts, but it would be nice.
Would be nice if Xe(La)TeX could gain this kind of intellegence.  

regards
	Keith.

Am 14.11.2011 um 20:50 schrieb 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