On 18 April 2014 17:57, Stéphane Gourichon <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thank you Lex for these explanations.
>
> It appears to me that far from being a danger (neither for beginners nor for
> seasoned users), ascii-ids actually solves a problem that hits beginners
> with simple documents.

Only those beginners that use dblatex and default tex.

Anybody using fop (and HTML) do not have the problem.  Thats why I
mused that maybe fop should be the default pdf generator (apart from
the fact that its also more compliant).

[...]
>
>> Unfortunately one of those is
>> Tex, so sadly I don't see the problem going away soon.
>
>
> Since as you said TeX workflow only accepts ascii ids, it looks like we must
> use it or we're doomed.

Just send a patch to dblatex to use a Unicode compliant version of tex :)

>
>
>> 4. You can avoid all the palaver by giving those titles manual, ascii
>> only, ids which override the automatic ones.
>
>
> So, doing like below is safe, right ?
>
> [my_chapter_title]

[[my_chapter_title]] or if you are like me [[mt]] :)

> == My chapter title
>
> (...)
> For details refer to <<my_chapter_title>>.
>
>
>
> I was worried about doing something wrong, but actually it looks like with
> this pattern applied there is no problem.

Yep, if an explicit id is specified no automatic one is generated.


>
> More importantly, activating ascii-ids solved an important problem that
> affects beginners.
> By "beginner" I mean a simple usage with no cross-ref, just text and chapter
> titles.
>
> When first trying asciidoc a moment ago I was shocked to discover that
> whenever I had a chapter title with an accent, the whole thing was broken
> (well, for the LaTeX toolchain at least). That's a very bad signal to users,
> it says the software is fragile and drives away people of many languages.
>
> With ascii-ids enabled no problem happens to simple documents. Users of
> cross-references choose explicit ids.
>
> For this reason, ascii-ids should actually become default.

I don't like the idea of making a nasty hack workaround for one broken
toolchain the default, but more importantly it will break all existing
documents that do refer to autogenerated section ids.

>
> Ids are ids, technical objects. They should not be computed from (or be
> equal to) chapter title, anyway. Adjusting a chapter title does not change
> the chapter identity. If the chapter title is the id, adjusting a chapter
> title breaks all references to that chapter. For that reason, making an
> explicit id ensures identity and is the right thing to do.

Yes, but boring and messy.

>
> Then, the documentation could just say "Warning : it is encouraged for
> portability to use only ascii characters in ids, because some toolchains
> only accept that. If you are sure your document will only ever target a
> single toolchain that will always support non-ascii ids, then you can use
> all characters in ids."
>
> Then I can't find a remaining reason for ascii-ids not being default.

It will break existing documents that refer to autogenerated ids.
Having archived documents fail to generate properly is a bad thing :(

Cheers
Lex

>
> Please tell me if I'm clear.
>
> -- Stéphane Gourichon
>
>
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