Re: input UTF-8 "as is"

[Emanuel Berg]

(gnu.emacs.help readers: relates to aa2u tool that was
mentioned in the RTF vs. plain vs. LaTeX discussion -
read on!)

jfbu <jfREMOVEbu@free.fr> writes:

> side note: in the code of \ttinput, you can also have
> the unicode diagram directly embedded, in place of
> the \@@input #1\relax part. You don't have to
> mandatorily maintain a separate file that you
> \ttinput, although I understand it could be useful to
> share it among various documents like one does with
> graphics files.

Now you made me think. In general, with C, zsh, Elisp,
etc., I always want neat short files to reflect themes
and areas of activity, if not straight modules, which
also go into separate files, of course. However, for
LaTeX, without thinking of it, I've had several
projects as singular, very long documents and the only
thing I kept outside was the file with the Biblatex
sources, containing only what didn't relate in
particular to my work (i.e., the pages of references I
had in the .tex file). So let's see... - no, I think I
prefer the Unicode figures in separate files, after
all.

> What you can't do however is put the unicode diagram
> in a macro via \newcommand, and then use that macro:
> it would be too late because the tokenizing will have
> taken place under the wrong catcode regimes for
> spaces and end of lines.
>
> Inside the unicode diagram, you can have macros, for
> example \includegraphics{myfile.png} is perfectly
> possible within the diagram. Or some
> \usebox{\mysavebox}, where \mysavebox could be some
> paragraph of text done in an arbitrary font, and with
> the spaces and end-of-lines in their standard catcode
> regime.
>
> Thanks for letting me discover this nice aa2u, I
> almost feel like I must find some task requiring
> diagrams! ;-)

> is there a tool to go back from Unicode to
> text-ascii?

Most definitely, I usually use tr for that kind of
stuff but I don't know if it can be used straight off
in this case. But there should be several tools that
can be put to do that without too much fuss. aa2u even,
perhaps?

> because, if you loose the txt files drawing the
> diagrams in artist-mode, you might want to
> reverse-engineer what
> http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/ascii-art-to-unicode.html
> allowed to do on ascii input
> (perhaps it is in the aa2u thing, I did not try it yet)

I also send this reply to gnu.emacs.help because there
is the enigmatic lisper who wrote aa2u, and he will the
best person to ask, of course. So hailing frequencies
should be open. (Next time we will explore the secrets
of time travel. Or will that be - the previous time?)

-- 
underground experts united:
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573