<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On 6 Nov 2021, at 12:22, Paulo Ney de Souza <<a href="mailto:pauloney@gmail.com" class="">pauloney@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Nov 6, 2021 at 9:22 AM David Carlisle <<a href="mailto:d.p.carlisle@gmail.com" class="">d.p.carlisle@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br class=""></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr" class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="">with a standard UK keyboard for example, it's much easier to type
<code class="">\’a</code> and --- than
<code class="">á</code> and
— <br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">David</div></div></div></blockquote><div class="">Not by any stretch of the definition of the term "ergonomically difficult": \'a requires 3 keystrokes, á requires 2, on the standard UK keyboard. On an absolute majority of keyboard types - it is just 1 keystroke.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">There will always be a need for pidgin-codes for entering special characters like ---, after all, the keyboard of the Linotype was a lot bigger than a normal modern keyboard, but there is no need for any special input for accented letters -- this has been completely resolved by standardization of keyboards.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Paulo Ney</div></div></div>
</div></blockquote></div><br class=""><div class="">I use the ABC - Extended layout on my Mac which has á requiring three key strokes: opt-e a. – requires two keystrokes (opt—) and — three (shift-opt--), but for largely for convenience across contexts, I generally prefer the Unicode conventions over the TeX conventions. But, there are also a lot of legacy documents out there not to mention most English-speakers type far fewer accented characters than I do so even if the characters are within reach, they not know about them. </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The biggest use case for TeX-style accent markup comes from the huge swath of BibTeX files (or automatically-generated citations) that exist all over the internet. Enabling \’a for á in a finl document will likely be a non-default setting, but will be required for reading data from bib files (in which case \’, e.g., will expand to be its argument followed by U+0301 (perhaps with some special handling in the case where a user types something like \’{aa} which in LaTeX currently will output áa rather than aá which a naïve implementation of \’ would do).</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">-dh</div></body></html>