[tex-live] fwd: \delta in overfull \hboxes screws up xterm

Vladimir Volovich vvv at vsu.ru
Wed Jul 14 09:38:19 CEST 2004


"TH" == Taco Hoekwater writes:

 >> Please, have a look at the forwarded mail. Paul Vojta shows a
 >> problem with the "all characters printable" setting.  When
 >> replying, please consider that Paul did not follow the discussion
 >> in may/june on the texlive list about this neverending story...

 TH> Neither was I, and the archive for TeXlive seems to be broken so
 TH> I cannot read back the old discussion. But luckily that doesn't
 TH> stop me from having a say about it :)

 TH> TeX's behaviour in this situation is, IMO, broken, and I would
 TH> personally prefer fixing TeX, instead of disabling 8bit :

 TH> The user *did not* input the character corresponding to ^^J, but
 TH> the 6 characters comprising the string "\delta". The fact that
 TH> someone \mathcode-ed the character ^^J to mean the same thing as
 TH> the \mathchardef named \delta should not have an effect on the
 TH> printing of the control sequence "\delta".

Or at least, TeX's output to *terminal* should honor the locale's
isprint() properties. All other output (to log files, \write,
\special, etc) MAY use 8-bit, if one wants to, but there's no reason
to insist on "pure 8-bit" for output to *terminal*.

Best,
v.



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