Am Sonntag, 10. April 2005 19:12 schrieb Martin Pitt:
> [...]
> Is there any actual difference between HYPHEN and HYPHEN MINUS? At the
> moment I'm inclined to add a HYPHEN (0x2010) definition that just
> produces HYPHEN-MINUS (0x002D).
For the moment, I just added a
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{8208}{-}
to my LaTeX documents because this seemed reasonable to me. But this
declaration would produce a minus sign and no hyphen when used in math mode
so something like
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{8208}{\mbox -}
seems to be better.
I'm not a Unicode expert but I think the situation is as follows.
HYPHEN MINUS is just an ASCII legacy. ASCII doesn't have different code
points for hyphen and minus sign. In contrast, Unicode does have. So if you
use Unicode, it's best to use HYPHEN if you want a hyphen, and MINUS SIGN if
you want a minus sign.
Well, TeX distinguishs between hyphen and minus sign via its modeâit produces
a minus sign in math modes and a hypen in text modes when given a
HYPHEN MINUS in source code. So normally using HYPHEN MINUS in LaTeX source
code is okay.
But my situation is as follows. I write a software which translates XML
documents to LaTeX source code, encoded in UTF-8 (project showxml on
SourceForge.net). The author of an XML document probably shouldn't rely on
the transformation system to correctly handle HYPHEN MINUS according to the
context. (The XML document should be appropriate for transformation systems
other than mine too.) So he/she should use HYPHEN for hyphens and MINUS SIGN
for minus signs. That's why I have a strong interest in HYPHEN (and MINUS
SIGN) support of the ucs package.
Best wishes,
Wolfgang
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