[XeTeX] Em-dash

[Juan Francisco Fraile Vicente]

Which is that compose key on Linux?

I think all of you have a part of reason, but we have to remember that one
of the best things of the world of TeX is the multiple options that offers.
Erasing that conventions would be a loss.
Although I agree (it's difficult to see --- sometimes and the source code
may result in low readability), XeTeX is everyday more known for linguists
that work with several languages. And the great characteristic of XeTeX is a
more comfortable environment for working with several languages (that it is
possible in LaTeX, but some time ago it was not so easy for some of us if
working with Unicode).
Many people working with documents in several languages have the same
problem: it's necessary to change again and again between language-keyboard.
And every keyboard usually puts diacritical marks, dashes, points and other
chars where the designer wanted/preferred. In this way those methods of
LaTeX are very productive: LaTeX accents, for instance, make much easier to
put vocalic quantities in Latin, or marks for textual criticism in Greek
like a point under a greek letter. These are two examples only, and I agree
with some  of you that suggest to learn the keyboard distribution, but
sometimes it's more difficult than it seems (for instance, in Spain we have
our own distribution, specially different because it includes our 'ñ', and
if I change to Greek layout on Linux is really different and few intuitive
for Spanish users). I am designing a layout for Ancient Greek for Spanish
keyboard and people who will use it will have to learn where I put the
em-dash for instance, but if they work with XeTeX and those codes of LaTeX,
this question is independent of the keyboard, the system or the editor, I
think.

Sorry if I have made any mistake talking about XeTeX, I will be always a
**TeX learner...

Best regards,

Juan Francisco

2010/5/4 Andrew Moschou <andmos at gmail.com>

> On Linux, there is the compose key, on Mac, there is the option/alt key,
> and both are very convenient. On Windows, there are the alt key codes but
> these are very inconvenient, instead you can use the program AllChars (
> allchars.zwolnet.com) which imitates the behaviour of the compose key. I
> use these methods and have learnt the few combinations that represent the
> common unicode characters (dashes and quote marks apart from accented
> letters).
>
> I would argue that using the proper characters increases readability of the
> source code: e.g. J\"urgen Strau\ss{} is harder to read than Jürgen Strauß.
>
> The tricky thing about the various dashes is that, with a monospaced font,
> it is hard to work out what sort of dash you are looking at (they're all the
> same length).
>
> Andrew
>
>
> On 4 May 2010 13:15, Wilfred van Rooijen <wvanrooijen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> I'd have to somehow input the character directly, and I am sure that there
>> are ways to do that, but those will not increase readability of the source
>> code :-))
>
>
>
>
>
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