> Sure there is. But also there's a good chance your working environment is > adapted to cope with that problem: editors guess the document encoding, > mail and websites explicitely tell you about it and so on. The other side > simply is that 7bit ASCII is fine for English and (I daresay) probably > English only. If you see tex source as "program code", that is in a > technical way, that may be ok. But I guess the majority of tex users (maybe
I view TeX as program code, and that's the root of our disagreement. However, I feel that TeX is meant to be program code. In Knuth's TeXbook, he explicitly tells people to view TeX as a beast that eats tokens. He says that when you write, you must keep the category codes in mind so that you know exactly how TeX, as a system, behaves in response to your input. So, I'm okay with a few extra keystrokes. Its an investment that I'm willing to pay. I think the interest is worth it. >> Plus, is \'e much worse to type than '<BS>e? > > No, its not. My point is not about digraphs, its about non-ASCII > characters. Thankfully, German doesn't have so many accents on its letters > like French, Italian, Spanish and so on. (similarly, I could have asked about \"u) Let's say you have a u-umlaut key on your keyboard. Isn't there going to be a time when you accidentally don't hit the modifier you need to activate the umlauts? Won't it be harder for you to notice that a u is lacking its umlaut than it will be to notice that a u is lacking its \"? To me, it seems like a safer convention to try to force myself to do \"u (or use a Vim mapping that explicitly expands to it, rather than using inputenc). >> So, in your case, I'd recommend using Vim's mapping features to map >> those keys to their LaTeX counterparts. That way everyone is safe and >> your message gets communicated loud and clear. > > I for my part am happy to accept the risk of non-compatible encodings for > non-ascii characters to gain the ease to be able to type and read all > characters as they naturally occur in the language im writing in in the > moment. And I'm happy to view my TeX and document separately, with my PDF viewer in one window and my TeX source in another. PDF viewers that support autoreloading and spell checking help make my own editing process very reasonable. But TeX isn't just for me. It's reasonable that different kinds of authoring should be available, and the type of authoring that lets you read the TeX (instead of the final product) should be allowed. For now, TeX is far from that. TeX has scarce unicode support and is going to need a massive overhaul to make editing in different languages cleaner. For now, cheap hacks are the best we can do. Best -- Ted -- Ted Pavlic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace _______________________________________________ Vim-latex-devel mailing list Vim-latex-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/vim-latex-devel
