Hello all, I have a request for a new primitive in XeTeX, not directly related to typesetting by I think useful. To understand why I'm asking, a bit of background would be useful.
The LaTeX team have recently taken over looking after catcode/charcode info for the Unicode engines from the previous rather diffuse situation. As part of that, we were asked to ensure that the derived data was traceable and so have included the MD5 sum of the source files in the new unicode-letters.def file. We can happily generate that file using pdfTeX (\pdfmdfivesum primitive) or LuaTeX (using Lua code), but not using XeTeX. That's not a big issue but the need for an MD5 sum gives me an idea which would need support in XeTeX. LaTeX offers \listfiles to help us track down package version issues but this fails if files have been locally modified or don't have date/version info. It would therefore be useful to have a system that can ensure that files match, which is where MD5 sums come in. Once can imagine arranging that every file \input (or \read) has the MD5 sum calculated as part of document typesetting: this is not LaTeX-specific. This data could then be available as an additional file listing to help track problems. However, to be truly useful this would need to work with all three major engines, and currently XeTeX is out. I'd therefore like to ask that \pdfmdfivesum (or perhaps just \mdfivesum) is added to XeTeX. ---- There are a small number of other 'utility' primitives in pdfTeX/LuaTeX (some in the latter as Lua code emulation) that might also be looked at at the same time (see http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/22496265#22496265): - \pdfcreationdate - \pdfescapestring - \pdfescapename - \pdfescapehex - \pdfunescapehex - \pdfuniformdeviate - \pdfnormaldeviate - \pdffilemoddate - \pdffilesize - \pdffiledump - \pdfrandomseed - \pdfsetrandomseed most of which are not related to PDF output and which may have good use cases. I am specifically *not* asking for any of these to be added here but note this list as it *may* be that the work may be closely related. -- Joseph Wright -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex