On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 04:46:50PM +0100, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote: > > > Michiel Kamermans wrote: > > >When switching from LaTeX to XeLaTeX, the first thing to realise is that > >in XeLaTeX, you write your text in unicode, relying on the unicode way > >of representing characters and character sequences. As such, the best > >choice is to not "access glyphs" but to just put them directly in your > >document: just use €, ſ, etc. > > 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.
As one who never had a keyboard with a Euro sign or accented characters, I totally agree. I see TeX "shorthands" as a sort of input method, as long as it gets translated into proper Unicode some where before actual rendering is done, I see no harm in using it. Of course if one uses such characters extensively, direct Unicode input is a better choice (and one then should have proper keyboard layout). That being said, I think xunicode already does this. -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team Free font developer -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
