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Avoiding active characters

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A while ago, I had a bug report for siunitx, which gives an infinite loop if used with htlatex. It has taken me a while to work out where the problem was, but it comes down to the use of active characters. I’ve given it some thought, and now have a solution that will work in the development version of siunitx. I’m currently reluctant to modify the release version to alter this behaviour, because it is quite a big change. If this is an issue for lots of people, I’ll revisit this, of course.

Hopefully, UTF-8 capable engines (XeTeX and LuaTeX) will mean that the general use of active characters can be avoided. There are a lot of pitfalls, and in general it seems to be much better to steer well clear unless absolutely necessary.

Written by Joseph Wright

July 4th, 2009 at 8:34 am

Posted in LaTeX,siunitx

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  1. [...] while ago I wrote about avoiding active characters. There was a question on the LaTeX3 mailing list recently, where this came up again. So I thought [...]

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