[XeTeX] Newbie Question: Accessing Glyph

[Tobias Schoel]

There is also the possibility of intelligent input methods, e.g. IBus, 
which has Unicode and LaTeX input methods (besides a lot of input 
methods for non-european scripts).

I prefer reading text as text and  markup as commands (It's also easier 
for non-texies to read it.), so text should be true unicode. (Although I 
admit, its faster to type "`bla"' than with unicode double quotes.)

bye Toscho

Am 13.09.2010 18:37, schrieb Khaled Hosny:
> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 04:46:50PM +0100, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
>>
>>
>> Michiel Kamermans wrote:
>>
>>> When switching from LaTeX to XeLaTeX, the first thing to realise is that
>>> in XeLaTeX, you write your text in unicode, relying on the unicode way
>>> of representing characters and character sequences. As such, the best
>>> choice is to not "access glyphs" but to just put them directly in your
>>> document: just use €, ſ, etc.
>>
>> Much as I sympathise with, and understand, this Unicode-oriented
>> approach, it seems to me that in real life, and in the absence
>> of a universal keyboard which can conveniently and easily be used
>> to enter the myriad human languages that Unicode contains, the
>> "traditional" TeX way of entering diacritics (and characters
>> beyond those found on an English keyboard) is actually by
>> far the most useful and usable.  If XeTeX does not currently have
>> a macro set which allows all such characters to be conveniently
>> entered mnemonically (and \char "0123 doesn't count as mnemonic !),
>> then I do think that there is a clear case for its creation.
>
> As one who never had a keyboard with a Euro sign or accented characters,
> I totally agree. I see TeX "shorthands" as a sort of input method, as
> long as it gets translated into proper Unicode some where before actual
> rendering is done, I see no harm in using it. Of course if one uses such
> characters extensively, direct Unicode input is a better choice (and one
> then should have proper keyboard layout).
>
> That being said, I think xunicode already does this.
>