[tex-live] TL2004: Technical problems and testing

Thomas Esser te at dbs.uni-hannover.de
Wed May 12 16:23:01 CEST 2004


> No, TeX has always been system-dependent in the tty/log output.
> 
> I can see that having a way to achieve system-independent output may be
> desirable, but I think it cannot be the priority right now.

David Kastrup has written on the tetex-pretest list:
    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.

In the past, he could work around any locale-dependency by adding using
cp8bit.tcx; this no longer helps. For him (resp. his software), the new
setup is a step backward :-(

Thomas



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