Re: new beta: 2.96.2

Thomas Esser <[email protected]> writes:

> > Time for praying.  Is there a a summary available?  Web2C's tendency
> 
> Olaf Weber wrote the following summary:
> 
>     Given the amount of feedback I've had, I've mainly gone on my sense of
>     what would be useful, usable, and (I think) comprehensible.
> 
>     - Currently, the code distinguishes between writing to the terminal
>       and log on the one hand, and other writes (\write) on the other.
> 
>     - For writes to the terminal and log, isprint(3) function is used, and
>       this is locale-dependent.

[...]

>       - In a TCX file you can specify a third value, to explicitly set
>         a character as printable or non-printable.  This is the way to
>         make characters non-printable if -8bit is used as well.
> 
>       - The xord/xchr/xprn arrays are always saved in the format, for all
>         engines except those in the Omega family.  Thus, a TCX or -8bit
>         given in INI mode sets the defaults for that format.
> 
>       - If a TCX is specified, it overrules whatever is in the format.
> 
>       - If -8bit is specified, it overrules whatever is in the format.
> 
>       - The \xchr, \xord, \xprn primitives are only available in encTeX.

> writing to the terminal and log additionally depends on the locale,
> so characters that the locale considers unprintable are displayed as
> ^^xy.
> 
> That summary should help. If you can forsee any problems, let me know.

Uh oh.  As I said, preview-latex works by analyzing error messages.
Those need to be in 8bit.  There are several Unix implementations with
broken locales, and the Windows implementations tend to don't have
anything even faintly resembling locales, too (typical for fpTeX).

In addition, it is very common to let LaTeX run on Latin-1 texts even
when the default system locale happens to be UTF-8.  Within Emacs, I
just interpret the output according to the coding of the input, and
the results look fine.

In the case of broken or inconsistent locales, about the only workable
alternative was to specify --translate-file=cp8bit for every call of
TeX/LaTeX.

The way the description of the new behavior sounds, not even this will
help against systems with broken locale settings now: the TeX error
messages will refuse to use the encoding of the input files even then.

Please tell me if I misunderstood anything.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum