[XeTeX] xunicode's textipa command

[Ross Moore]

Hello Andy,

On 07/11/2009, at 4:17 AM, Andy Lin wrote:

> I'm currently using linguex to typeset examples, and I've noticed that
> \textipa is broken within the \ex. command/environment. Upon further
> investigation, it seems that even \newcommand\ipa[1]{\textipa{#1}}
> breaks \textipa (although \let\ipa\textipa, as mentioned in the tipa
> manual, is fine). I'm not sure what the problem is exactly, if it has
> to do with xunicode setting capital letters as active in its textipa
> implementation or something else,

No. xunicode  redefines most of the TIPA-defined macros to result in
the correct Unicode codepoints, so that most things just work,
provided

  1. you set a font that has the correct glyphs;
     e.g. Charis SIL

  2. you do *not* load  tipa.sty  which would just
     create confusion (unless you know how to keep
     the definitions well-separated, using the
     font-encoding mechanism).

The advantage of using  XeTeX + xunicode  is that the
resulting PDF should be searchable, even for non-Latin
characters, and copy/paste should work from the PDF
into text-based documents.
LaTeX + TIPA package does not give you these practical
benefits.


> but I did find an earlier discussion
> on the subject http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/ 
> browse_thread/thread/64916c5485349818/f8fdde95b0a636ba? 
> #f8fdde95b0a636ba
> though the solution proposed there was to simply input the unicode
> equivalents of the IPA characters (which would break compatibility
> with non-unicode LaTeX), or to come up with a TECkit mapping for the
> IPA characters (which I'm willing to do, but only if there are no
> other options).

The TECkit mapping approach is interesting, but is really only
applicable if you are using non-active characters, rather than
macros, to specify the font characters.

> Has anyone run into this problem before? Can it be solved by some
> combination of \protect, \expandafter, etc.?
>

Can you provide an example (La)TeX document that displays
some of the difficulties that you are facing.


> Sincerely,
> Andy Lin


Hope this helps,

	Ross


Oh, by the way, please subscribe to the XeTeX list,
if you want to continue this kind of email exchange.



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Ross Moore                                       ross at maths.mq.edu.au
Mathematics Department                           office: E7A-419
Macquarie University                             tel: +61 (0)2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia  2109                          fax: +61 (0)2 9850 8114
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