[tex-live] Feature request for web2c/tex...

[David Kastrup]

Hi,

one frequently encounters the situation where one has a program run
with some command

latex "\AtBeginDocument{...}other junk...\input{whatever}"

or even

latex "\AtBeginDocument{...} \input{extracted_region}"

Obviously, this does not cooperate with the -parse-first-line option.
It would be nice if one had a -first-line-file=whatever option
available to let TeX revert to the given file _before_ looking at
commands introduced with "\".

It would not be prudent to use something like
-parse-first-line=filename option itself for this: the user might
enable and disable parse-first-line in his config file, and this
setting should usually be obeyed unless overriden explicitly.  The
-first-line-file=... option would typically be passed in by TeX shells
and similar that don't necessarily pick up the users preference for
one setting or another.

Another question: I have not been able to get my TeXlive2005 into the
state where it outputs ^^8a and similar transcriptions to the
terminal, even by setting LC_CTYPE to C.  This means that I have a
harder time testing my smart recoding routines for AUCTeX, designed to
cater with those uglinesses.

Is there a reasonably easy way to get, say, an encoding that will
quote 00-09, 0b-0c, 0e-1f, 7f-9f, so that I get the original ugly
situation (imagine this transcription when you are really using
UTF-8!) that preview-latex now is designed to cater for?

Thanks,

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum