Mojca,
In reply to your question:
> I don't really understand how accented characters are typeset in
> (Con)TeX(t). One of the main reasons for switching to LaTeX (maybe 8
> years ago) someone mentioned was: "You don't have to worry about accented
> characters. You can make any accented character and it will work all over
> the world." (We actually did have lots of problems with MS Word and web
> browsers at that time.) And it was true.
You know that all characters in a font have a number. If you type a, the font
mechanism makes sure that you see an a. In reality the font shows you the
character that is put on the numerical position of a. In the font dingbats for
example, the character on that position is not an a, but a symbol.
In Latex the combination \"{a} can mean two things:
1. in most fonts: show the charachter on the a given numerical position, which
means that there is one character �.
2. in some other fonts \"{a} means: combine " with a and make an �. This means
that " is combined with the character on the numerical position of a. TeX does
this very well and thus construes very acceptable diacritical signs like \"{q},
\d{o}, \v{o}, which do not exist in regular fonts.
If you have a font which contains \"{q}, \d{o} or some other special
characters, you may instruct TeX not to create the character, but rather to
show the contents of a given numerical position in that font. That's what the
.enc and .fd files under Latex are for.
That's also the reason there are, or used to be, special fonts for Polish an
Czech and other languages: they contain predefined characters in one single
numerical position, e.g. \v{s} and \v{c} that TeX does not have to create anew
from two signs.
Kind regards,
Robert
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