On 2004-07-10 20:39:06 -0400, Karl Berry wrote:

Hi Martin,

As you may have noticed, I reported an issue on the pdftex lists a few days ago regarding catcode 12 backslashes in \pdfoutline et al. Although Hartmut and Heiko and I have discussed it some, and Hartmut has written some patches, I haven't seen any definitive decisions on what we want to do, and I want to fix texinfo.tex accordingly.

(It comes up in practice with Texinfo because in Texinfo, unlike most (all?) other common formats, backslash is supposed to be a "normal" character that can be used in cross-reference targets.)

In short, suppose we have:

\catcode`\/=0 /catcode`\\=12 /pdfcompresslevel=0 /pdfdest name {xyz\} hello from xyz /vfill/eject /pdfoutline goto name{xyz\}{to xyz\}

This produces an invalid PDF file, because the \ escapes the end-of-string ) delimiter in the output:

<< /S /GoTo /D (xyz\) >> ... (to xyz\)

The choices seem to be:

1) do nothing, and leave it up to the document's TeX code to double the backslashes in all cases. This is the current situation, de facto.

2) have pdftex escape the backslashes in the target names only, so that it would produce (xyz\\) and (to xyz\).

3) have pdftex escape the backslashes in the outline text only, so that it would produce (xyz\) and (to xyz\\).

4) have pdftex escape the backslashes in all situations, so that it would produce (xyz\\) and (to xyz\\).

Karl, 4 would be the logical choice for pdf.

Escaping the backslashes implies that TeX code cannot produce PDF string escapes. This does not seem like a serious limitation to me, since TeX can write any byte value (and pdftex "should" escape as necessary into \nnn octal notation in string constants -- I have not tested this).

I will.

Not escaping the backslashes implies that it's possible to write TeX documents which produce invalid PDF. This seems bad, however, if this is the case with other pdftex commands also, the argument loses its force.

We'll have to check this for consistency. Best regards Martin PS: I'm cc'ing the ntg-pdftex list so that Hans and Thanh and others are included. -- Martin Schröder, ms@artcom-gmbh.de ArtCom GmbH, Lise-Meitner-Str 5, 28359 Bremen, Germany Voice +49 421 20419-44 / Fax +49 421 20419-10 http://www.artcom-gmbh.de