On 10/8/07, Andrea Valle wrote:
Hi to all,
we (I and Miriam, who is in CC, but she should be now on the list) are setting up our ConTeXt installation in order to (re-)typeset the academic journal we are editors. We are both on macosx: the idea is to use XeTeX. I installed on Miriam's macbook mactex, and I also have updated it from the mactex site. Exactly like mine. We're experiencing this problem: we have an utf 8 text and I'm compiling with no problem on my machine. On Miriam's one 1. if we compile with ConTeXt-pdftex (specifying the regime) we are having little black boxes near the non-ascii char (i.e. an accented glyph is rendered as non accented glyph + box)
The problem is that your utf-8 text doesn't use normal "eacute", but rather "e + combining acute accant", and pdfTeX will never be able to handle that. I could send you a patch to remove those black boxes, but you won't be able to put them over the character before it, so that won't help you at all. TeX needs accent specification before the character. A combining accent after the character cannot be handled, at least not in pdfTeX - XeTeX and LuaTeX should be fine with it. Can you try to convert the text again using pdftotext -enc UTF-8 your-pdf-document.pdf and copy that text into the main document?
2. if we compile with XeConTeXt the resulting pdf simply skips the accents (e.g an accented glyph is rendered non accented)
The default font (LM) doesn't work properly with any version of ConTeXt prior to 2007.09.28. But if you load some system font, the accents should work OK. If you are using XeTeX, I strongly recommend you to use both the same version of ConTeXt. The one from January and the one form September differ considerably. (Even with the latest one I have some problems again - I need to figure out where the problem is, but it's nothing critical.)
More: We can't do ctxtools --updatecontext
it complaint it cannot fetch the zip
Download the zip manually and unzip it to the folder where the old ConTeXt resides. Run mktexlsr and texexec --make [--xtx] --all. updatecontext doesn't do anything else. Mojca