@DavidCarlisle I hadn't really appreciated that. You mean a single glyph is used for both? I've never actually really used a 7-bit encoding (for text).
@barbarabeeton Thanks. It's just everything else is so precise, I keep forgetting this isn't.
@cfr -- @DavidCarlisle's point about the 7-bit limitation is the key. Considering the capacity of computers in 1978, and for quite a few years more, it's amazing that TeX could be created at all.
@barbarabeeton I'm sure you're right. I'm just irritated because I find things confusing enough even when I don't have to realise the symbol shown verbatim shouldn't be typed verbatim. Probably this was more obvious if the symbol shown verbatim couldn't be typed verbatim, which might have applied then, maybe?
@cfr there is no "both" just as there is no separate single quote and right curly quote, or separate minus sign and hyphen they are the same character just in different font styles,
@cfr the symbol shown could be typed it just looks a bit more curved, but no different from looking at an italic g and saying it's not the same shape as a g on the keyboard
@DavidCarlisle Oh. I thought 'both' meant something else. (I did know there is only one single/right quote. I wanted to know why this one.)
@DavidCarlisle I don't find that analogy entirely convincing. If you only have one key for single quotation marks, your input doesn't distinguish between two punctuation marks with different meanings (unless you abuse a backtick, say). I'm not convinced 'g' and 'g' have different meanings (in typical text contexts).
@cfr -- If it's not too personal, what was the coding system in use when you first started using a computer? (For me, it was BCD, which is probably not even in use any more. Even ASCII was a huge dislocation. And Unicode is a total overload. As an aside, somewhere in the middle of all that I also had a period dealing with the Chinese telegraph code.) What one is used to really biases one's view of the world.
@Skillmon Perfect! Thanks. That works really nicely.
@JasperHabicht Thanks. That method was what I thought of doing. The zeros can't be added later because the files are already named. But @Skillmon has given a very nice solution.
@cfr I was out walking on Saturday and there's a house nearby with both a US and Welsh flag flying in its garden.
@cfr -- I was sneakily trying to determine when you first got your hands on a computer keyboard. (I assume it was one that had a keyboard, although there was a period when for some computers the main input was via toggle switches.)
@barbarabeeton 1980s: some time around 1982/3/4, I think. And yes, it had a keyboard. It also had a joystick and some kind of storage my dad reckoned was The Future and we never, ever used. I tried to persuade it to draw a square one day, but failed utterly. Over the road, they just typed square 5 or something, but ours had some kind of superior graphics which required entering endless subroutines. I made a mistake somewhere and I had no way to correct it. I didn't try programming it again.
@UlrikeFischer -- A proposed edit to your accepted answer looks suspicious: tex.stackexchange.com/a/702614 I didn't do anything, but thought you should know about it.
@cfr apostrophe is character 27 ' right curly single quote is character 8127 ’ You can make that distinction if you have 1114111 slots to fill. In ascii, with only 127 slots you simply haven't the space to distinguish them, just as you can't distinguish alpha, beta, gamma from ab[c or g or somethg] tex math fonts same as the adobe symbol font used the same slots for latin and greek, just a font change so if you cut and pasted alpha you got a, (if you had a system that could cut)
@DavidCarlisle I think \alpha vs. a is a much better analogy. Thanks. But I do actually know how font encodings work. That wasn't really what I was asking.
@JasperHabicht @PauloCereda They are just not very good at plurals ;).
@JasperHabicht -- Maybe. It tried to tell me the other day that it was infected. I just shut it down immediately and restarted ... and keep hoping it's not true.
@barbarabeeton Every so often my Spotify app on my phone decides to display everything in a different language. One time I got Korean, and another time Amharic.
@AlanMunn I get that sometimes with web pages. I always assume it's a failure to use my second language preference. But I doubt you have your first language set to anything unusual, so it must be a conspiracy to target forest users.
Is there an easy way to position coffins at specified coordinates using the l3draw package? In this experiment I just shifted the origin inside a scope, but it feels a bit strange.
@AlanMunn Not very odd, no. Whereas my first preference is rarely available. (And sites where it is available typically default to English anyway. Especially university pages.)
@AlanMunn How do you know which language it is? I know you're a linguist, but ....
@cfr Well it depends. If it's written in a Latin script, I've encountered data from lots of languages so I'm likely to be able to identify it unless it's really odd. For the major East and S. Asian scripts, I can identify (but not read) pretty much all of them. But for languages which use Arabic or Cyrillic I don't read those scripts, so I really can't tell what language is actually being written in them. Amharic I happen to know from restaurants good Ethiopian/Eritrean places in DC.)
@cfr btw, I passed a house around here flying a Welsh and American flag :)
@AlanMunn Indeed, most languages spoken in Asia have their unique writing system. So, it is quite easy to identfy the language just by the used characters. Arabic and Cyrillic letters are used for a wide range of different languages.
@AlanMunn Of course, Latin is as well use for myriads of languages, but being a person whose "mother-script" is Latin, I'd say that one has probably developed a good eye for identifying specific letter combinations that are typical for certain languages ...
