@CarLaTeX You should have asked for a U+2E41 for Christmas

@DavidCarlisle Indeed!

Super cool rocket printing thingy: youtube.com/watch?v=kz165f1g8-E

For the token list pretty printer idea I mentioned before, I made one looks like this

Also discover that if you set escapechar to a nondefault value globally, there will be weird error in aux file from second run (nonlocal error message...)

I was wondering if there was any reason to use the babel package if one is only writing in English.

I loaded it in an (English) file, but I see no reason for having done so.

From our new local wine merchant ^^^

@FaheemMitha you can select english english rather than colonial hyphenation patterns, but otherwise no, not really.

@DavidCarlisle OK. Though I'm not sure what "english english" vs "colonial hyphenation patterns" means, exactly.

@FaheemMitha UK English hyphenation as opposed to the default US English patterns,

@DavidCarlisle Oh. I didn't realise they were different.

@FaheemMitha 99% of TeX documents done in the UK (including most of mine) probably use the default US patterns because frankly most people don't care about the finer rules so long as the hyphens come in more or less reasonable places but: ctan.org/pkg/ukhyph

@DavidCarlisle I see.

So Babel governs hyphenation, among other things?

@FaheemMitha that's the main thing it does really (that and some fixed texts for "table of contents" or whatever)

@DavidCarlisle Oh. I thought it did other things. Dunno what, though.

@FaheemMitha -- US hyphenation is nominally according to pronunciation. UK hyphenation is allegedly etymological. (Consider those two possibilities for "helicopter".) There are exceptions, of course, and that's an oversimplification.