[tex-live] packages with characters > 127

[Robin Fairbairns]

Elie Roux <elie.roux at telecom-bretagne.eu> wrote:

> I've detected and sorted the packages in TeX Live 2009 that contain
> 8-bit characters > 127 (and thus cannot be used directly by LuaTeX nor
> XeTeX). I'll have to deal with most of them one by one with the
> author, but some of the problems can be dealt directly in TeX Live,
> with the same change in ctan2tds as for etextools.

does yvon read the tl group?  in case not, yvon, the problem here is
non-ascii characters, which will not ordinarily work with the utf-8
based tex variants.  this is bad enough news in the .dtx, but it's
catastrophic in the .sty file.

> One has a slightly different case: the .sty is generated from the .dtx
> but is also present on the CTAN... can it be adapted directly without
> any change on the CTAN? If not, can the CTAN delete it directly or
> should the author (in copy of this mail) be asked? The file is
> clefval.sty from clefval.dtx.

this .sty would have been deleted at install time, nowadays, so i've
deleted it now.

> Finally some packages (mostly by the same author) have a more tricky
> case: they can only be generated with LaTeX. For these packages, the
> question is: can LaTeX have the same behaviour as TeX for output
> files? If yes, can ctan2tds be changed to make it happen? The packages
> are:
> - engpron.sty from engpron.dtx (the .sty file should also be removed
> from the CTAN)
> - silence.sty from silence-doc.dtx (idem for the .sty file)
> - paresse.sty from paresse.dtx (idem for the .sty file)

i've deleted those three (all by yvon, too).

> - fvrb-ex.sty, hbaw.sty and hcolor.sty from fvrb-ex.dtx

wow.  fancyverb is a package i approach with great caution, always.
i've had trouble contacting the authors, too (i think sebastian rahtz
has now retired, so don't bother him -- i think his last ever work on
tex was tug 2000 in oxford.

> The final question: is it useful to ask the authors of packages with
> some 8-bit characters in the comments to change them? I don't think so
> but there are certainly some TeX uses that I don't know about...
> 
> I have also found a strange packages with 8-bit characters that have
> no license nor author: verbatim.tex.

which one of:

1996/04/25 |       1117 | language/hebrew/hebtex/doc/guides/tex_guides/s_verbatim.tex
1993/12/16 |       1117 | language/hebrew/hebtex/doc/guides/tex_guides/verbatim.tex
1998/09/24 |       1118 | language/hebrew/hebtex/macros/tex_macros/verbatim.tex
1995/08/07 |       2895 | macros/generic/diagrams/kuvio/doc-src/macros/misc/verbatim.tex
1993/11/12 |      12548 | macros/generic/misc/verbatim.tex
1991/09/06 |       1337 | macros/inrstex/inrsinputs/verbatim.tex
2006/01/01 |        401 | macros/latex/exptl/mem/verbatim.tex
1992/08/27 |       1579 | macros/plain/contrib/misc/verbatim.tex
1991/02/22 |        846 | support/mctex/verbatim.tex
1995/04/29 |      12969 | web/tweb/texinput/verbatim.tex

(they're probably all versions of the same file, apart from the mem
version.)

> For information, the list of files with which I'll have to deal with
> the author is:
> - mattens.sty

(boggle: i didn't think afrikaans used inflected characters at all)

> [omitted]

robin