[XeTeX] anti-xunicode ;-)

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 7/21/06, Firmicus wrote:
>
>  Hello again,
>
>  I am rapidly getting addicted to XeTeX :-) ...
>
>  I want to continue using UTF-8 input encoding even when certain glyphs
> (basically characters with diacritics from the LATIN-EXTENDED-ADDITIONAL
> block, which I need to transliterate Oriental languages) are not present in
> the font used to typeset the document. To do so I make those UTF-8
> characters \active and define a macro that checks whether the glyph is
> available in the font, in which case it retrieves it, else it calls another
> macro to compose the diacritics as in traditional LaTeX.

I find the idea OK.
Some time ago I also asked for the feature, so that you wouldn't need
to create zillions of definitions like \ifnum\XeTeXcharglyph"XXXX > 0,
but that you would only provide a fallback definition for that letter
and if letter wasn't available in the font, XeTeX would use the
fallback definition automatically. (Otherwise you need a fallback
definition for almost every Unicode character which might become slow
and impractical ...)

I'm really looking forward to see that working if it will ever be implemented.

Mojca