[XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance

Joseph Wright joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk
Tue Apr 28 08:04:23 CEST 2015


On 28/04/2015 00:48, Douglas McKenna wrote:
>> That isn't at all clear, I don't see any evidence that the equivalent &#....; notation in XML is getting less used. For runs of natural language text then clearly using character data directly makes more sense
>>  but to get specific symbols accessing by code point often makes sense. 
>>
>> To get a math bold A, It is much easier to tell someone to enter ^^^^^1d400 than to tell them how
>> to enter �� in whatever system they are using.
> 
> Of course, every Unicode reference on the web would be referring to it as U+1D4000.  Sigh.
> 
> Anyway, duly noted.  Except in the future, "whatever system they are using" will likely be able to handle the UTF-8 character as direct input, just like it appears (in my email reader) above as a math bold A.

Well yes and no. Whilst editors, viewers, etc. can be expanded to cover
the entire Unicode range, no one font will cover the entire spectrum. At
the same time, most keyboards are only ever going to have ~100 keys. So
whilst for the main language of a document Unicode makes sense, saying
that you have to find the correct Unicode code point for everything is
not so convenient. (One can arrange different key binds to flip between
which could be used to do for example the math-mode bold A business, but
that may or may not be easier than just typing \mathbf{A} or whatever,
depending on the use case.)
--
Joseph Wright




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