Hi Phillip,
You are missing a point here. Or points.
Does a font have the glyph?
How to access the glyph?
What is the easiest way to input the glyph?
Readability of the input source.
Even though we have unicode not all font have the
complete code pages of unicode, so that causes a problem
in itself!! Second we would 8^2 commands for describing to access
all. This would be optimal, but who can remember them all and
readability and input becomes tiresome!!
I can remember when I started out with TeX and hated having write
"a for ä on my german keyboard! Then came inputenc. That was nice.
Got rid of a lot of problems with other styles and packages not working
well or breaking when you used "a. I still had problems because I was
using
Apple and had to be careful when passing my files to others on PCs.
LaTeX could handle the file, but the others could not readily edit the
file
for lack of a editor that could handle MacRoman without converting the
file,
but then the inputenc had to be changed!
Then there was the problem of different font metrics depending on where
you got them from!
Then there was also, the problem of multiple languages in one text. Boy,
did the input become cumbersome and unreadable for the no geek LaTeXer.
Well, unicode and Xe(La)TeX has gotten rid of most of the problems of
readability
and input.
Since unicode is so vast and the fonts have become rich, certain things
still remain.
They are not an artifact of TeX nor unicode, but the problem of input
method of the
system you are on and the editor that you use. As far as universal
keyboards is concerned
there are programmable keyboards that have LED-keys show you the
glyphs/characters and
change!! Yet, you still have TO KNOW where to find the glyph.
Remember, when you wanted certain characters you had to enter ALT
control codes to
get the character that was not on the keyboard. Well, you can always
use key mapping
and bindings to help. If you have a good editor there is also code
substitution or auto-complete
so that the proper glyph shows up or the proper Xe(La)TeX code.
Xe(La)TeX, and TeX in general, is highly complex and flexible you have
to have some
indepth knowledge to use it with ease, comfort and competence. If that
knowledge is to hard or cumbersome
to learn then one should stay with WYSIWYG systems.
The people working on Xe(La)Tex have done an excellent job and are
working hard to make things
as easy as possible, yet certain things they can not change or make
much easier.
regards
Keith.
Am 13.09.2010 um 17:46 schrieb Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd):
>
>
> 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.
>
> Philip Taylor
>
>
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