[XeTeX] dealing with $ character

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 8 juil. 04, à 09:00, Jonathan Kew a écrit :

> It's not quite the same issue as the accent commands; at least the 
> legacy TeX fonts support the standard character code for dollar, so a 
> definition such as \char"24 (or changing the \catcode so that $ simply 
> prints as itself) should access the right glyph in anything except 
> special legacy symbol fonts. The trouble with the accent commands is 
> that the CM fonts have accents at non-standard code positions and so 
> the macro definitions are inherently font-specific.

Well, it looks like what would be needed is a motivated individual 
writing a .tex file redefining all such predefined plain TeX control 
sequences (\$ \' etc.) in terms of the corresponding Unicode code 
points, and similarly for LaTeX (chasing beforehand all such control 
sequences inside the various LaTeX files where they reside, i.e. .ltx, 
.enc, textcomp.sty files etc.). (I can't be this individual, sorry.)

I thought that was similar to what 
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/tex/xetex/xplain.tex does. What is 
it exactly that this file does, BTW?

That would allow the user to benefit from both Unicode and TeX, namely 
give him/her Unicode "union" (insert the math set union symbol here) 
TeX, instead of the usual approach of fonts in TeX which is to map 
fonts to TeX encoding first then use them in the standard TeX way, 
hence giving Unicode "intersection" (insert the math set intersection 
symbol here) TeX only.

Bruno Voisin