[XeTeX] Re: XeLaTeX and jurabib

Bruno Voisin bvoisin at mac.com
Sat Oct 2 13:12:55 CEST 2004


Le 2 oct. 04, à 12:19, Simon Spiegel a écrit :

> Le 2 oct. 04, à 09:49, Bruno Voisin a écrit :
>
>> Le 2 oct. 04, à 08:36, Simon Spiegel a écrit :
>>
>>> - Before using XeLaTeX I already used UTF8, but there seems to be a 
>>> difference here. Until now I always used "--" for an – and `` for 
>>> ``. This worked perfectly, now with XeLaTeX they don't get converted 
>>> anymore. I guess it's some kind of encoding problem, but I don't 
>>> really understand what is going on here.
>
>> You do need to replace all -- by –, — by —, ` by ‘ and ' by ’ etc. 
>> Same
>> reason: XeTeX nees proper UTF-8 to work. But in that case
>> utf8accents.sty cannot help.
>
> That's a bit annyoing. As I said, I used UTF8 before, 
> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} handled this properly...

The problem lies in the fonts rather than in the engine (LaTeX, 
XeLaTeX). --, ---, ``, '', !` and ?` are implemented as ligatures, 
defined in the metrics (.tfm) file for a font. The metrics for the CM 
fonts include these ligatures. However, there is no such ligature 
(which are a TeX specificity, made unnecessary by Unicode) for OS X 
(AAT, OpenType) fonts, and no such thing as a .tfm file for these fonts 
anyway, and you need to type in the original character in UTF-8 form 
directly, namely –, —, “, ”, ¡ and ¿.

I just verified that the problem does vanish when using CM fonts in 
XeLaTeX (but then, of course, why use XeLaTeX?). I don't know whether 
Ross (Moore, the author of utf8accents.sty) has something in store for 
ligatures, that converts them to Unicode equivalents in the same way as 
it does for accents. I also have no idea of how utf8.def works, and 
have never used it.

Bruno Voisin



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