[XeTeX] Whitespace in input

[Zdenek Wagner]

2011/11/15 Chris Travers <chris.travers at gmail.com>:
> 2011/11/15 Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>:
>> 2011/11/15 Mike Maxwell <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu>:
>>> On 11/15/2011 5:39 AM, Chris Travers wrote:
>>>>
>>>> My recommendation is:
>>>>
>>>> 1)  Default to handling all white space as it exists now.
>>>> 2)  Provide some sort of switch, whether to the execution of XeTeX or
>>>> to the document itself, to turn on handling of special unicode
>>>> characters.
>>>> 3)  If that switch is enabled, then treat the whitespaces according to
>>>> unicode meanings.  If not, treat them as standard whitespace.
>>>
>>> I think you asked me earlier whether that would satisfy me, and I failed to
>>> answer. Yes, it would.
>>
>> But such a solution is not clean, you cannot plug in such logic to the
>> TeX mouth when the input is being read nor to the output stage when
>> TECkit maps are in effect. I wrote the reasons earlier. The only
>> reasonable solution seems to be the one suggested by Phil Taylor, to
>> extend \catcode up to 255 and assign special categories to other types
>> of characters. Thus we could say that normal space id 10, nonbreakable
>> space is 16, thin space is 17 etc. XeTeX will then be able to treat
>> them properly.
>>
> But we are talking two different things here.  The first is user
> interface, and the second is mechanism.
>
> What I am saying is special handling of this sort should be required
> to be enabled somehow by the user.  I don't really care how.  It could
> be by a commandline switch to xelatex.  It could be by a call in the
> document if that's possible.  It should be optional, and disabled by
> default, given that the characters involved are not intended to be
> displayed with glyphs.
>
The mechanism is simple, set this \catcode to 13 and define it as
\nobreak\space. If you wish to make it clever in all XeLaTeX corners,
find one of my previous posts to see what has to be taken into
account. It may be present in a package called nbsp.sty or so. No
change in XeTeX is needed if you do it this way.

> Best Wishes,
> Chris Travers
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>  http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz