[Mac OS X TeX] Language setting and backslash character

[Dr. Paul Fons]

On Sunday, January 13, 2002, at 05:29 PM, Ross Moore wrote:

> [Charset ISO-2022-JP unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
>>   I am a happy user of TeXShop here in Japan. I was curious to ask if
>> anyone else has had the same problem as me --- namely with the Mac OS X
>> set to Japanese as the preferred language, the backslash character is
>> changed automatically to the "yen" symbol.  For systems up to and
>> including Mac OS 9, the "yen" character and the backslash character 
>> were
>> one and the same thing (the same ascii code).  With OS X, however, the
>> two characters have different codes (unicode).  This means that one
>
> Hmm; that's certainly an annoying problem for you.
>
> Sorry, I cannot see a way around this with existing TeX implementations,
> since TeX has not been written to recognise the Unicode charset.
> That means that if Apple has dictated that the character code of \ (in 
> English)
> will show inside editors as a "yen" symbol, then that's the way it will 
> be
> when looking at TeX source. (Note that the files should still typeset 
> OK.)
>
> Of course, you can set the language back to English (or other language)
> temporarily when working with TeX documents.

Actually that's the funny thing.  The files do *not* typeset correctly 
if they were copied over (via file sharing) from another (my) mac 
running OS X with English set as the preferred language- the backslash 
character in the file has actually changed to a yen symbol (this 
surprised me too). The latex compilation fails right away as it does not 
recognize the begin document command due to the changing of the 
backslash to a yen symbol. The only conclusion to reach is that one must 
use the English language setting.  What is perhaps more annoying is that 
the JIS keyboards do not have a backslash character on them.  Is there a 
way to modify the keymapping (as in X's Xmodkeymap) to (for example) 
change the yen key to a backslash?
>

						Paul Fons


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