On 9/13/2010 8:46 AM, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
Much as I sympathise with, and understand, this Unicode-oriented approach, it seems to me that in real life, and in the absence of a universal keyboard which can conveniently and easily be used to enter the myriad human languages that Unicode contains, the "traditional" TeX way of entering diacritics (and characters beyond those found on an English keyboard) is actually by far the most useful and usable. If XeTeX does not currently have a macro set which allows all such characters to be conveniently entered mnemonically (and \char "0123 doesn't count as mnemonic !), then I do think that there is a clear case for its creation.
I can't speak for others, but if I need a rare character, I fire up BabelMap, look for the thing by name, and then insert it. Until a second ago, for instance, I had no idea what the unicode value for a lower case o with macron (ō) was (turns out it's U+014D), and I won't have to remember it either because every time I need it I'll just insert it into my text, to ensure it stays readable, even as TeX source.
Of course, if you use a specific character a lot you can bind it to a macro like \thatcharIconstantlyneed (but then named sensibly, of course) and use it that way, so I suppose I should have said "try to avoid using \char unless it's for a character that you use frequently and can't input in a simple manner, like via an "insert symbol" in your editor".
My personal prefernce is to try to keep the text as human readable as possible. Because putting in a macro for a letter makes the source harder to read ("jōhō" is human readable, "j{\omacron}h{\omacron}" is not, for instance; or using "deʃign" instead of "de{\esch}ign") the small effort for infrequent characters usually pays off when revisiting a text. But it does require more discipline to stick with that mode of writing!
(Of course this does not apply to typesetting, say, medieval text that requires both regular and long s in specific places. Then one would reach for a package that lets you type normally and picks the right version of s, ſ or ʃ for you)
- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans nihongoresources.com -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
