Re: Summary of state of utf-8 supported terminals

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

On 07/03/2015 12:32 PM, sfeam wrote:
> On Friday, 03 July 2015 03:46:28 AM Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>> On 07/03/2015 12:42 AM, sfeam wrote:
>
>>> Did I miss a terminal you were interested in?
>>
>> JPEG works...
>>
>> I think I will just treat all working under utf8, except PostScript and
>> try to resolve the libgd issue separately.
>
> If JPEG works then PNG must work also.
> It is the same driver.
>
>> Note, I think there is an invalid ASCII character in the utf8.dem demo.
>
> Umm. It is a demo of UTF-8, not ASCII.
>
>> When I tried compiling the latex output, the program complained about
>> an unfound character.
>
> I already noted that most latex installations do not handle the full
> range of characters.  Even if it handled \0177 is would almost certainly
> fail on the subsequent test lines.
>
>> I looked at the output in gvim and saw
>>
>> ...z{|}~}}
>>
>> the third last character which appears as ^? in gvim but may be another
>> glyph in your mail viewer.  That line in the demo is labeled 0061 -
>> 007E, but 7E is 126 and octal \177 is 127.  ASCII 127 is the [DEL],
>> which I'm guessing is not assigned a glyph.  I suggest removing \177
>> from utf8.dem.
>
> IMHO one goal of the demos is to provide a set of unit tests.
> The idea is to exercise everything and find out what may not be working
> on the system where the test is run.  It's kind of pointless to remove
> a test just because it succeeds in indicating a point of failure.

Here are test results for utf8 and latex terminal.

When compiling the gnuplot-generated LaTeX file, any characters that act 
as control-chars/tags in LaTeX cause a problem.  E.g.,

! You can't use `macro parameter character #' in restricted horizontal mode.
<argument> !"##
                \$\%\&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@
l.10 ...)[l]{!"#\$\%\&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@}}

I made the following substitutions to achieve the intended text:

#  =>  \#
$  =>  \$
%  =>  \%
&  =>  \&
<  =>  \textless
>  =>  \textgreater
\  =>  \textbackslash
^  =>  \^
_  =>  \_

One question is should such translations be added to the latex terminal 
when requesting a text string?  We could make it an option to the latex 
terminal, e.g., "textsubstitute".  An alternative is to use one of the 
LaTeX verbatim constructs but that risks the user typing in the exit 
character from verbatim, causing more confusion.

After those changes, the \177 character produces the following error:

! Text line contains an invalid character.
l.12 ...(0,0)[l]{abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~^^?
                                                   }}

After removing that \177 character, LaTeX compiles the file correctly, 
basically ignoring all the rest of the UTF-8 characters.  All those 
lines appear blank.

Dan