Am 28.09.2010 um 02:20 schrieb David J. Perry: > As a relative newcomer to Xe(La)TeX, and proponent of Unicode and > multilingual computing for 15+ years, I was very surprised by the lack of > Unicode support in the TeX world. I think what lshort and other tutorials > need is a very clear and unbiased explanation of this situation.
I wholeheartedly agree. > Something along these lines: > What is Unicode? How is it different from traditional TeX? > Why has TeX been slow to adopt Unicode? (TeX is a standardized system that > predates Unicode; has good tools for math typsetting that meet the needs of > many users) ...and is was programmed by an English-speaking mathematician, primarily for the needs of English-speaking mathematicians. If you write a mathematical paper in English, there will be only three kinds of non-ASCII characters: - Typographic characters such as “, — or …, for which TeX (ab)uses ligatures or macros - Math characters, for which TeX has mathchardefs, special font encodings and macros - A few number of accented characters to typeset author names from “foreign” countries, for which the \accent primitive suffices > Who needs Unicode + TeX now? (multilingual users mostly, also those who > want a larger variety of fonts and OT/AAT support, and the ability to easily > interchange data with software outside the traditional TeX orbit; math users > probably don't, since Unicode math is still developing) I'd even say everybody needs it or should need it, just like everybody needs Unicode-aware operating systems, text editors, browsers, etc. It has finally become normal to be able to enter every character everywhere; lack of Unicode support is a severe flaw nowadays. -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
