[OS X TeX] Re: Preparing large non-tex text for use in latex

[Joachim Kock]

Hi Steffen,

> I would love to use Alpha's filters for this kind of purpose, too.
> The only reasons why I hesitate are ...
>
> ... can Alpha deal with UTF-8 today?
> ... can Alpha do a non-irrevocable line wrap ("soft wrap")?

The answer to both questions is no.

Concerning the first, this is acknowledged by the developers as
a serious shortcoming.  Work is under way to make the next
version of Alpha fully unicode compliant, but that's "tomorrow",
not "today" (8.2).

(Personally I am rarely bothered by this shortcoming: when it
comes to TeX, 7-bit ascii seems sufficient for my purposes.)

The second issue, soft-wrapping, does not seem to be a priority,
but I would not be surprised if it is offered as an option in
the next version, which will have a completely rewritten text
rendering engine, as far as I understand.

Cheers,
Joachim.

PS: Out of curiosity, what is good about soft wrapping, in your
opinion?  In my ignorance (honestly), I mainly see drawbacks,
since many line-related operations lose in value, e.g. go-to-
tex-error-line, diff, comments, discrepancy between line-
navigation and logical lines, etc.