[XeTeX] \(pdf)mdfivesum

Philip Taylor P.Taylor at Rhul.Ac.Uk
Wed Jul 1 21:18:32 CEST 2015



Apostolos Syropoulos wrote:

> To the best of my knowledge Perl and Python are available for Windows.
> People can download and install the languages. I do not think that
> Microsoft would have any objection to this. So instead of augmenting
> the language with unnecessary primitives, ask people to install a
> serious scripting language. For years people in this forum are talking
> about microtypography and other things that are missing from XeTeX so
> I think it would be far more important to fully support these additional
> features. 

I have never used, or wanted, an MD5 checksum, but I can nonetheless see
why Joseph believes that it would be useful to be able to compute such a
checksum from within *TeX, in order to be able to record in the log file
a quasi-unique identifier for an opened file.  It is not at all clear to
me how the same could be accomplished using an external scripting
language.  If you could explain, Apostolos, how *TeX would be able to
interact with such an external scripting language in order to ascertain
the MD5 checksum for an opened file, then perhaps I could better
understand your proposal.

Philip Taylor


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