[luatex] Plain counterpart to luainputenc?

[Eduardo Ochs]

Hi David,
can you give a simple example of using the virtual font support in plain luatex?
I gave up using *inputenc and friends, I am using \catcode's and
\def's, but there are lots of things that I haven't had time to learn
yet... for example - unrelated to virtual fonts, i guess - how to make
the output of running pdftotext on the .pdf file look nice...
  Cheers =),
    Eduardo Ochs


On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 7:35 AM, David Carlisle <d.p.carlisle at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 21 February 2016 at 08:15, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> If the document contains certain UTF-8 characters, e.g. an em
>> dash, and the font does not have them, the characters are not
>> displayed. Some tools give a warning message, some even abort
>> with an error.
>>
>> In many cases lualatex can get around this if you say
>> \usepackage[utf8]{luainputenc}.
>>
>>
>> What does one do in plain luatex?
>
>
>
> using luainputenc (and so disabling luatex's support for utf8) is hitting
> the missing character
> with a very large sledgehammer.
>
> In luatex you could use the virtual font support to essentially add the
> missing characters as virtual entries or just use the classic tex technique
> of active characters.
>
> \catcode"2014\active
> \def^^^^2014{whatever you want to fake a dash with}
>
> David
>