[XeTeX] Long dash "--" in Latex

[Musa Furber]

Sir,

It seems beneficial to provide some sort of compatibility for some of 
the more common LaTeX ligatures, such as `, ``, ', '', -, --, and ---.

Regards,
Musa

On 2 Jul 2004, at 04:01, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> On 1 Jul 2004, at 5:01 pm, ชนพ ศิลปอนันต์ wrote:
>
>> -- and --- are ligatures; they are converted to en-dash and em-dash
>> respectively by ligature rules in traditional TeX's way. Therefore, 
>> they
>> are not available in XeTeX.
>
> Right; or, to be more specific, they're handled by ligature rules in 
> the TFM files of the Computer Modern fonts (and many other fonts for 
> which TFMs have been created). They'll work just the same in XeTeX 
> *if* you're using such fonts.
>
> But if you're using AAT or OpenType fonts *without* TFM files--the 
> capability which is the major "selling point" of XeTeX--then access to 
> any ligatures is dependent on ligature rules encoded in the AAT or OT 
> tables of the font you're using. And -- and --- are not normally 
> implemented there.
>
> On the other hand, you can simply use the Unicode en-dash and em-dash 
> characters directly in your source text.
>
> Jonathan
>
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