[OS X TeX] Puzzled by an accented i

[Josep Maria Font]

Alan Munn <amunn at gmx.com> ha escrit:

> On Mar 13, 2011, at 6:16 PM, Josep Maria Font wrote:
>
>> (However, I'm still wondering why \'{i} does not work in plain  
>> LaTeX without additions)
>
> Because that's the "right" way, typographically.  Accents on dotted  
> characters typically replace the dots.

I know.

But I thought that to obtain the "right" way one had to use \i. When I  
learned TeX (around 25 years ago), \' was a command that puts an  
accent on top of the first character at its right, whatever it is, so  
that for instance \'n and \'s could be used in Polish. In those times,  
\'i really produced a dotted accented i, and that's why Knuth invented  
the \i (and \j). Later on, we learned that in LaTeX it was better to  
consistently write \'{\i}...

Thus, probably with time the definition of the \' command has changed.  
Which makes all the more interesting to know that with the package  
tipa this is possible (in my case, precisely to write down a typos  
list showing that this should *not* be done; the original was written  
more than 20 years ago!).


JMaF