[Texmacs-dev] Special characters in regular text?

[Norbert Nemec]

Somehow, the handling of ASCII-special characters is severely broken in
TeXmacs 1.0.5.9:

I have the following file tryout.tm:
----------------
<TeXmacs|1.0.5>

<style|generic>

<\body>
  x:x;x,address@hidden/x(x)x=x?x'x"x[x]x\<less\>x\<gtr\>x\|x-x+x*x

  x#x$x%x^x&x_x{x}x~x\<backslash\>x
<  x#x$x%x^x&x_x{x}x~x\<backslash\>x
</body>

<\initial>
  <\collection>
    <associate|language|american>
  </collection>
</initial>
----------------

As you see, there are two lines with one "word" (no spaces!) each,
containing all the different ASCII special characters. The first line
contains those without special meaning in LaTeX, the second one those
that have to be quoted in LaTeX.

First, within TeXmacs:
* The first line is displayed correctly, no problem.
* In the first line, the double quote " cannot easily be entered with
automatic quotes active. It would be helpful if:
    a) it could always be entered using the <\> <"> <return> key-sequence.
    b) automatic quotes would automatically be switched off in verbatim
environments
* The second line is displayed incompletely: the characters '^' '~' and
'\' are physically there (you can enter them and cursor movement
respects them) but they are not displayed and do not even have a width.

Now, when exporting to LaTeX, I get complete garbage:

-----------------
\documentclass{letter}

%%%%%%%%%% Start TeXmacs macros
\newcommand{\tmbsl}{\ensuremath{\backslash}}
%%%%%%%%%% End TeXmacs macros

\begin{document}

x:x;x,address@hidden/x(x)x=x?x'x \tmbsl "x[x]x<x>x|x-x+x*x

x \# x \$ x \% x\^{ }x\&x \_ x \{ x \} x\~{ }x{\backslash}x

\end{document}
-----------------

As you can see, there are various problems:
* The doublequote gets \tmbsl and spaces prepended.
* In the lower line, most characters have spaces around or some other
garbage. What I would like to see is:

-----------------
\documentclass{letter}

\begin{document}

x:x;x,address@hidden/x(x)x=x?x'x \tmbsl "x[x]x<x>x|x-x+x*x

x{\#}x{\$}x{\%}x\^{ }x{\&}x{\_}x{\{}x{\}}x\~{ }x$\backslash$x

\end{document}
-----------------

Greetings,
Norbert