[OS X TeX] path names with umlauts

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 21.3.2012 um 09:30 schrieb RA Friedrich Vosberg:

> Could we say, only latin characters, arabic numbers, underscore and hyphen should be used in path and file names? Or would at least additionally comma be possible?

Apple's HFS+ accepts every valid Unicode character in file names except the path separator "/", the FULL STOP "." and double FULL STOP "..", which are valid relative directory paths (not names). I think LINE FEED and CARRIAGE RETURN are also possible (though not that easy to handle). COMMA is no problem (I have a few such file names for particular reasons).

Besides this there is LaTeX. Although it can handle with the original Knuth engine 8-bit characters in file names, it cannot use them "as is". Because these are transformed to LICR (LaTeX Internal Character Representation). This differs font encoding to font encoding. And it cannot accept "active characters" in file names.

So don't think in the abilities of a file system (today those in use cannot be called limited) but rather that of limited LaTeX! A-Z, a-z, 0-9, punctuation are OK. The characters !, ?, *, /, \, (, ), [, ], {, }, |, ;, ', ", : can have a special meaning to the shell which performs things for the TeX engine, so better don't use them in file names.


For the curious ones, Wikipedia has an article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_computer_shells.

--
Mit friedvollen Grüßen

  Pete

Give a man a fish, and you've fed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you've depleted the lake.