[luatex] \font primitive does not read otf file

Petr Olsak petr at olsak.net
Thu Dec 13 07:04:53 CET 2012


reinhard.kotucha:

> What the new engines offer is that one can write a text in a readable
> form (H. N.i instaed of H\`a N\d\ocircumflex i).  This is what people
> expect nowdays.

I agree, the intput methods for various languages are needed. For example 
I started with TeX 22 years ago only after TeX converted from seven bit to 
eight bit and I was able use usual input methods for my language. The 
seven bit TeX seemed to me as totally unusable (it was unsupposable to 
write Ol\v s\'ak instead Olšák for example in common Czech text). On the 
other hand, when I sent my TeX source to the world I convert these Czech 
characters to 7bit TeX notation because this is robust. But we are 
discussing about typesetting specific characters (--, ---), no language 
specific characters.

> If you want to preserve the old behavior, you can
> provide macros like \def\alpha{.} after all (dot is real UTF8 alpha here)

Do you plan to remove \mathchardef\alpha=... from basic TeX macros and 
replace them only by \mathcode"03B1=... ? Why? The only reason is that 
there exists one input method in one text editor? Is it sufficient reason 
for such major decision? Why is inpossible to have both declaration
(\mathchardef\alpha=..., \mathcode"03B1=\alpha) in paralell?

This decision is similar to removing -- and --- ligatures as default
ligatures from TeX fonts.

Petr Olsak


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