[XeTeX] Traditional TeX ligatures once again

Marcin Woliński wolinski at mimuw.edu.pl
Thu Jun 28 17:52:06 CEST 2007


Dnia 28-06-2007, czw o godzinie 15:21 +0100, Jonathan Kew wrote:
> On 28 Jun 2007, at 2:21 pm, Evgenie Medvedev wrote:
> > Unfortunately, while these << and >> sequences translate into  
> > ligatures
> > in pre-XeTeX fonts,
> 
> In the TeX-encoded Cyrillic fonts, to be more exact; not in Computer  
> Modern Roman, AFAIK. 

Not exactly exact :-)
The << and >> ligatures are present as well in all(?) fonts in the T1
aka EC encoding.  The same is true for two commas, which get transformed
into a Polish opening quotation mark.  So all three are in a way
standard (at least in the LaTeX world, which uses T1).

> So this behavior would have been dependent on  
> choosing an appropriate font encoding, or something like that (I've  
> never really known much about this aspect of LaTeX).

You are of course right, however the simplest solution is probably to
add mappings for <<, >>, and ,, to tex-text.map.   They can do no much
harm since generally there is not much use for < in text mode with
Knuthian fonts and probably there are no languages which use double
commas.  So if anyone has <<, >> or ,, in their input file, what they
mean is one of quotation marks.


Here is the proposed snippet for tex-text.map:
U+002C U+002C   <>      U+201E  ; ,, -> DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
U+003C U+003C   <>      U+00AB  ; << -> LEFT POINTING GUILLEMET
U+003E U+003E   <>      U+00BB  ; >> -> RIGHT POINTING GUILLEMET

With best,
Marcin





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