[XeTeX] XeLaTeX English and IPA examples

[Ross Moore]

Hi Cyril,

On 27/10/2004, at 5:35 PM, Cyril Niklaus wrote:

>
> On 27 oct. 04, at 10:19, Michael Erlewine wrote:
>
>> Does anybody have an example XeLaTeX document with English and IPA 
>> (International Phonetic Alphabet)? I'd love to see it.
> This was done in a minute, and I realized there's something wrong. Oh, 
> it's French words (but that's not what's wrong!)

>
> I was planning on doing a little test with this week, so your mail 
> prompted it. I have a problem with the schwa and square brackets 
> though, the compilations stops with a:
> ! Missing number, treated as zero.
> <to be read again>
>                    p
> l.8 [pəti]
>              petit\\
> ?
> What it causing this error? The FAQs I've read on that are not very 
> helpful.

This is a common LaTeX problem:  \\ takes an optional argument,
that specifies how large a vertical gap to use before the next
line of text.

Since line-ends are treated as white space, then

      ......\\
       [whatever]

is the same as

      .....\\[whatever]

and will cause an error unless the "whatever" is a <dimen>
(i.e., a number!).

You'll need to do something like:

     .....\\{}
      [whatever]

or
     .....\\
      {[whatever]}

to get what you seem to want.


Hope this helps,

	Ross



> Cyril
>
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Ross Moore                                         ross at maths.mq.edu.au
Mathematics Department                             office: E7A-419
Macquarie University                               tel: +61 +2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia                                  fax: +61 +2 9850 8114
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