[tex-live] Technical showstoppers for TL2003

[Hans Hagen]

At 01:33 14/09/2003 +0400, Vladimir Volovich wrote:

>The boolean expression defined here should be |true| unless \TeX\
>internal code number~|k| corresponds to a non-troublesome visible
>symbol in the local character set.  An appropriate formula for the
>extended character set recommended in {\sl The \TeX book\/} would, for
>example, be `|k in [0,@'10..@'12,@'14,@'15,@'33,@'177..@'377]|'.
>If character |k| cannot be printed, and |k<@'200|, then character |k+@'100| or
>|k-@'100| must be printable; moreover, ASCII codes |[@'41..@'46,
>@'60..@'71, @'141..@'146, @'160..@'171]| must be printable.
>Thus, at least 80 printable characters are needed.
>@:TeXbook}{\sl The \TeX book@>
>@^character set dependencies@>
>@^system dependencies@>
> 
>
>@<Character |k| cannot be printed@>=
>   (k<" ")or(k>"~")
>=========================
>
>perhaps it would be good to be able to make TeX behave according to
>this default specified by Knuth, as well as the suggested
>"full-8-bit-output".
>
>maybe this can be done via texmf.cnf as a system-wide setting, - then
>it will be possible to get whatever behavior one wants by default -
>either the one suggested in the TeXbook, or the "full-8-bit-output".
>maybe TeX should read some TCX file, say, default.tcx which will be
>either cp8bit or will make only the chars in the range 32-126
>printable (but it should not be acceptable to use non-ID maps which
>contain nontrivial maps as system-wide setting)...

so, something:

write_mode = 0  % 0-255        as is
write_mode = 1  % 0-31         in ^^ notation
write_mode = 2  % 0-31 128-255 in ^^ notation
write_mode = 3  % whatever the locale wants

with write_mode = 0 being the default

Hans
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