[XeTeX] VIQR pre-processor wrotten in (Xe)TeX ?

[Ross Moore]

Hi Andrew, and Phil,

On 25/11/2011, at 9:38 AM, Andrew Cunningham wrote:

> Word final vowels with punctuation following, e.g. full stop, question mark.
> 
> the following sentence:
> 
> Tôi yêu tiếng nước tôi từ khi mới ra đời.
> 
> is represented in strict VIQR as:
> 
> To^i ye^u tie^'ng nu+o+'c to^i tu+` khi mo+'i ra ddo+`i\.
> 
> Notice the escaping of the full stop at the end of the sentence.
> Without the escaping the full stop would be converted to diacritic
> below the letter "i".

What a pain for TeX, which already uses  '\.' to put 
a dot-below accent on a character.


At least here we have \.<space>  (since '.' has catcode 12, not 11).
So it should be possible to modify the definition of \.{ } within
the NFSS processing of \.  to assign a special meaning.
This is coding that could be easily included within Xunicode.sty , 
but applied only optionally, according to encoding or within a font-switch.

You would need that user code of  \.<space>  and equivalently \.{ } 
should expand to a sequence of:
   '\' + '.'  each with catcode 12  followed by a space.
Then your TecKit .map patterns can be defined to respect this.

There will be problems when \. is meant to be used as a symbolic
separator for other purposes; e.g. as a decimal point,
or something like:  <word>\.<word>   (for whatever purpose).
Or at the end of a block of characters with no trailing space.

An alternative may be to define some other way to get the '\'
with catcode 12.

Or within environments that want to use VIQR data, the \catcode
of '\' is set to 12, with some other character ('|' say) becoming
TeX's category 0  escape-character.

This is probably best, as you'll need to define such environments
anyway. However, it makes it awkward to pass VIQR strings around 
within the arguments of macros. 


> 
> or another example:
> 
> Anh ddi dda^u\?
> 
> This escaping is part of VIQR and any input system that is based on VIQR.

Offhand I cannot think of any alternative meaning assigned to \? .
Is there one, in any special language, implemented in (La)TeX ?


> 
> 
> Andrew
> -- 
> Andrew Cunningham
> Senior Project Manager, Research and Development
> Vicnet
> State Library of Victoria
> Australia
> 
> andrewc at vicnet.net.au
> lang.support at gmail.com


Hope this helps,

	Ross

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ross Moore                                       ross.moore at 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
------------------------------------------------------------------------