[XeTeX] Em-dash

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 5/4/2010 1:11 AM, Wilfred van Rooijen wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This seems to be precisely the issue. Xetex can read and understand 
> all unicode characters, but at this time, the only way to communicate 
> with the computer is through the keyboard and the mouse. Thus, there 
> will always be issues with "special characters". I don't know if it 
> exists, and if not it may be interesting to develop, but a keyboard 
> with LCD keys would be nice.
>

http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/

It exists, it's not the most ergonomical, and it's a bit pricy. But my 
biggest problem with it is that it's a good idea but using the wrong 
technology: you don't want LEDs, you want "only require power when you 
set them" keyfaces, so E-ink would be infinitely preferable (but there 
are no E-ink keyboards =). Then you also know what they keyboard can do 
when you turn off the power, or the system goes on standby, because the 
faces don't disappear.

In the mean time, for infrequent characters my personal stance is to 
just use a character selector program such as Babelmap on windows (I 
forget the name on the Mac, it's quite a nice utility). For frequent 
characters, at least in windows and I assume in other OSses as well, you 
just install an extra kayboard mapping for the language in which the 
characters are frequent, and alt-shift cycle your way to that language. 
For instance, to get accented Dutch characters in windows, you'd add 
Dutch as keyboard mapping, and typing "e will produce ë. A friend showed 
me this can easily de done in Ubuntu as well, so I presume all the *nix 
flavours including MacOS allow for this.

- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com
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