Re: luatex feature question/request

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

Hans Hagen wrote:
> Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> I was just wondering, whether something like this is possible in luatex
>> - and if not, if it might be implemented;).  I'd like to be able to
>> transform somehow the input right *before* TeX sees it.  What I mean is
>> e.g. a transformation using regexps.  Application I have in mind is as
>> follows: in Polish, there are a few prepositions which are one-letter
>> words; it's a bad custom to leave them hanging at the end of a line.
>> Such an option could automatically put ties (~) instead of spaces after
>> them - a feature sometimes requested by Polish TeX users.
> 
> input parsing is not needed here, it's easier to to do this on the node 
> list; remind me in a few months (it's rather trivial to implmenent since 
> the infrastructure is already in mkiv)

Hans is right, the node list should be altered instead of the input,
because you can never be sure that "\TEX\ i \METAFONT\" is not
hidden inside a definition somewhere.

There actually is a way to modify the input lines just before they
are parsed by luatex, but that is really only suitable for converting
8-bit encodings to utf-8. (I was going to post an example abusing
that method, but there are way many things that can go wrong, so I
changed my mind)

Best wishes,
Taco
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