[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Axel Kielhorn]

Am 26.09.2010 um 06:13 schrieb David Perry:

>   lshort is meant to be, well, short.  Having even this much will give those unacquainted with xe(la)tex some idea of what it's all about, and the reference to the wiki will (I hope) be a good source of additional information.

This is meant as a showcase:
The following is possible, now RTFM.

> Here are a couple of suggestions and some typos to fix:
> 
> "The main feature is the extended character set; [colon not comma] a font may contain Latin, Greek and Cyrillic [note caps] characters and the corresponding ligatures."

Thanks for the correction.

>  You do allude to the various OpenType features that are available with Xe(La)TeX, but I think another sentence or two would be helpful.  TeX has long supported some typographic refinements, such as true small caps, and many people use TeX because they care about high-quality typography.  Directing their attention to other OT features such as different types of numerals, forms for all caps typesetting, etc. would help them understand the true benefits of OT, aside from its linguistic support.

Yes, the different numerals are a good example.

> "Some editors, _mainly on Linux,_ support digraphs, two letters that are combined into one [not on] character."  The compose function is hardly ever used on OS X or Windows; the only instance of which I am aware is the OpenOffice extension that provides this facility.

I have to disagree, Vim and emacs (or should that be Emacs?) are available on Windows as well. (Maybe not used that often.)

Is the compose feature you mention the same as dead keys?
On a Mac I can type \texttt{option-u u} to get an ü (which may sound silly, since I have it on the keyboard, but I can type \texttt{option-u e} to get an ë which is not on the keyboard.

> 4.8.2: I suggest a brief mention of polyglossia and a cross-reference to the other section where you discuss it in more detail.
> 
> Under "It's all Greek to me," capitalize Unicode, Latin, Greek, Russian and Hebrew.  "advantage of using" should be "advantage to using."  Also, if you are going to explain \newfontfamily with polyglossia, I think you need to explain polyglossia's language-switching commands also, even if briefly.

I will look into it.

Axel