[XeTeX] Newbie Question: Accessing Glyph

[Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd)]

Michiel Kamermans wrote:

> When switching from LaTeX to XeLaTeX, the first thing to realise is that
> in XeLaTeX, you write your text in unicode, relying on the unicode way
> of representing characters and character sequences. As such, the best
> choice is to not "access glyphs" but to just put them directly in your
> document: just use €, ſ, etc.

Much as I sympathise with, and understand, this Unicode-oriented
approach, it seems to me that in real life, and in the absence
of a universal keyboard which can conveniently and easily be used
to enter the myriad human languages that Unicode contains, the
"traditional" TeX way of entering diacritics (and characters
beyond those found on an English keyboard) is actually by
far the most useful and usable.  If XeTeX does not currently have
a macro set which allows all such characters to be conveniently
entered mnemonically (and \char "0123 doesn't count as mnemonic !),
then I do think that there is a clear case for its creation.

Philip Taylor