[tex-live] Problems with non-7bit characters in filename

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Fri, 4 Jul 2014 03:17:29 +0200 schrieb Reinhard Kotucha:

>>> Lualatex is right, umlaut characters in latin1 are invalid sequences
 
>  > Thats true. While latin1 can include every possible character, UTF-8
>  > cannot. (possible as possible to have on the wire)
 
> You misunderstood.  The opposite is true.  UTF-8 (Unicode) supports
> all characters, Latin1 is a simple 8-bit encoding which supports only
> Western European languages (except French).

I think he means that in an utf8 encoded file some byte combinations
are not allowed. 

But the main question is why lualatex and xelatex in TeXLive can't
handle (probably only non-utf8) file names with non-ascii chars *on
the terminal*. I can reproduce his problem on Win7:

 > lualatex Äöü.tex
   This is LuaTeX, Version beta-0.79.1 (TeX Live 2014/W32TeX) (rev
4971)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
! String contains an invalid utf-8 sequence.

and then lualatex can't find the file.

> xelatex Äöü -> crash.

It is not something in the lualatex format: I get the same error
message with luatex --ini. 

In miktex there is no problem: The files are found. Also e.g. a
\jobname in the document works correctly and -- with lualatex and
xelatex and an utf8 encoded document -- I can also use \input{äöü}. 


I never use non-ascii chars in file names  -- I don't want to spent
my time to find out how to pass (and use) such names to external
tools or on other computers -- but imho a standalone luatex should
be able to communicate with the OS without errors and \openin etc
should work.  


-- 
Ulrike Fischer 
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/