[XeTeX] Em-dash

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hi all,

This seems to be precisely the issue. Xetex can read and understand all unicode characters, but at this time, the only way to communicate with the computer is through the keyboard and the mouse. Thus, there will always be issues with "special characters". I don't know if it exists, and if not it may be interesting to develop, but a keyboard with LCD keys would be nice. Then one can switch layout, and the characters on the keys appear differently. Of course, there would still be strange side-effects, such as a CJK space, which is really a 2-byte space, and xetex does not treat it as a regular space (rather, treats it like ~, I suppose).

Cheers,
Wilfred

--- On Tue, 4/5/10, Juan Francisco Fraile Vicente <juanfranciscofv at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Juan Francisco Fraile Vicente <juanfranciscofv at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Em-dash
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Date: Tuesday, 4 May, 2010, 4:48 PM

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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