[texhax] Vista and TeX (well, almost)

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Fri Feb 9 22:50:48 CET 2007


>>>>> "Chris" == Chris Rowley <C.A.Rowley at open.ac.uk> writes:

  >> UTF-8 is supported by LaTeX and Emacs.

  > Simply `UTF-8 support' is not sufficient for `Unicode 5.0'.  The
  > editor has to support the high numbers, sometimes called the
  > supplementary planes.  [And this is the reason for exposing this
  > calleng here: that is where some mind-bogglingly way-out slots,
  > inspired by LaTeX-maths, have ended up.]

I think two things are required: 

  1. You need a table which maps [sequences of] keystrokes to
     characters.  Emacs calls such tables "input methods".  There are
     input methods for many languages but I do not see anything math
     related.  However, with such an input method and UTF-8 encoding
     you should be able to to create a file which can be read by
     LaTeX. 

  2. You want to see what you type.  I do not know how much of this
     task is handled by Emacs itself and how much is delegated to the
     operating system.  I suppose that the OS is much more involved.

  > That sounds promising: is that GNU- or X-Emacs?  (I have not had
  > much success with mule so far, especially on Windows.)

GNU-Emacs.  If you had not been successful I guess that your Emacs is
too old.  An advantage of ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/auctex is that the
binaries I use on Windows at work are created from the same sources I
compiled on Linux at home.  This makes life much easier.

On a Windows machine of a Vietnamese friend I tried input encoding
utf8 and font encoding T5 and all I had to do in Emacs had been to
switch between input methods "german" and "vietnamese-viqr" in order
to typeset German and Vietnamese within the same document. (Well, I
just tried again and see that I can even access German characters with
vietnamese-viqr.)

I suppose that many people on this mailing list do not know what we
are talking about.  Ideally, the whole Unicode stuff should be buried
deeply in operating systems.  Anyway, for people who are interested,
Markus Kuhn's Unicode FAQ is the best starting point:

   http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

Regards,
  Reinhard

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