[tex-live] Technical showstopper

Fabrice Popineau Fabrice.Popineau at supelec.fr
Sat Sep 13 13:11:51 CEST 2003


It is about locale environment and tcx map file. Several people tried to
warn about it, but they do not seem to have been heard (comprised by myself).

It is unacceptable to distribute the tex binaries the way they work for
the moment. What will happen in all countries using some
iso-latin-something 8bits alphabet: typein the following simple document

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\begin{document

\tableofcontents

\section{L'édition}
Bla bla bla ...
\end{document}

You will end up with a
^^e9 instead of a é in the .toc file, and that's what French users will get in
their documents.

_It is stated nowhere that you need to run TeX with
-translate-file=cp8bit _

Moreover, you can't ask people to change their .tex files to add the
option in the first comment line of the file to be processed correctly.

We have to find an acceptable solution so that people can continue
typeset their documents as they were able to do it with previous
versions of the TeXLive.

Last remark about this : it is true that by adding some first line like :

%! translate-file=cp8bit

to the document, you will be able to process it correctly. But I
personally  find it a bit cumbersome to have to specify twice that you
are using an iso-latin1 encoding.

Fabrice



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