[Dev-luatex] Unicode in \pdfinfo

[Hans Hagen]

Khaled Hosny wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 11:49:07PM +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
>> Khaled Hosny wrote:
>>> \pdfinfo doesn't seem to support Unicode, when I compile the attached
>>> example with luatex I get symbols like هصة instead of the proper
>>> (Arabic) Unicode strings.
>>> Shouldn't luatex default to Unicode here too?
>> this is a backend c.q macro package issue ... (btw this can also be done  
>>  in pdftex, but i never came to enabling the code in context because  
>> there was nothign to test)
> 
> I suspected that, since hyperrref with latex does this, but I found that
> xetex supports Unicode pdfinfo directly and thought luatex should do
> this too. 

in luatex eventually we will have a more generic backend concept and try 
to minimize the number of specific primitives

for instance, at some point we will have something pdf.info being a lua 
table (representing a dictionary) and then one sets lua strings and 
these are just sequences of bytes; this is why a helper makes more sense

pdf.info.title =
   string.utf8valueto16be(0xFEFF) ..
   string.utf8toutf16be(somestring)

in the meantime such helpers could also be used in the regular \pdfinfo

as taco mentioned, xetex is a different animal .. ok, there could be a 
primitive doing the conversion, but there the pdf support is drivven by 
the dvipdfmx backend; also, keep in mind that in practice there are many 
more places where strings shos up (e.g. in user annotations) and not 
every string is representing text

(currently in context i use hex strings instead)

Hans

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