Re: Fwd: REVIEW REQUEST - user manual generation

[Vincent Belaïche]

Le 29/04/2016 00:42, Karl Berry a écrit :
>     <>| are not valid in filenames
>
> They are on Unix.  -k


Ooops... After some search on the Web I found this interesting
discussion:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1976007/what-characters-are-forbidden-in-windows-and-linux-directory-names

In comment #33 somebody says that under *nix the only forbidden
character in a file path is NUL (aka \0), and / cannot be used in
filenames, only as a file separator in paths.

So, this ruins my suggestion to catcode group locally special TeX
characters, as there may be some people (or SW) using <>| in filenames
under *nix for some special file that needs a crazy name to avoid
collision with other names.

However, instead of <>| I could use

\bgroup for group beginning
\egroup for group end
nul     for space.

Note, that implicitely I assumed that \ will never be used in a filename,
even under *nix for portability reasons to MSW.

Another method for handling special characters in filenames would be to
prefix all of them by \string (so this would even support filenames
containing \ as part of the filename).

My tex distribution expands all the macros in the filename before using
it, so that would be valid to do simply that for handling ~ and
suchlikes (just some piping the name through
   sed -e 's!\([#~\{}_^$]\)!\\string\1!g'
). However, I don't know whether this behaviour is widely used.

Also, it does not help with space to replace them by `\space ', or by
`\expandtafter\string\space ' to get some litteral space (space with
catcode 11). I have already tried that. The \input command is really
difficult in this that it does not work like other macros as far as
grabbing the argument is concerned.

It seems that LaTeX has redefined \input to support usual {...}
enclosing (under TeX if you use {...}, tex will consider the curly
braces as part of the filename). It would be interesting to test whether
the LaTeX \input allows spaces in filenames, and if yes, how did they
manage to do that.

As a side comment, not related to texi2dvi, it would be good to document
handling of special characters in filenames under LaTeX in latexrefman
manual.

  Vincent.