[XeTeX] XeTeX 0.9 and utf8accents.sty

[Jonathan Kew]

On 25 Feb 2005, at 4:25 pm, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 25 févr. 05, à 16:30, Ross Moore a écrit :
>
>> However, I might as well fix the other things too,
>> according to the discuss last week, or whenever it was.
>>
>> That is, ...
>>
>>  ... I can make \~{} give the accent character  Ux0C2D
>>  (as \textasciitilde  gives now )
>> and make  \textasciitilde  give the full-size tilde  Ux00E7 .
>>
>> This way both tilde characters are accessible.
>> Do you agree that this is the best approach ?
>
> I do. The name \textasciitilde itself, and the fact there is a 
> separate command \~, seems to indicate that \textsciitilde (and 
> similarly \texasciicircum and possibly the other commands from section 
> 3.14 of usrguide.dvi) is meant to be used as a full-size character, 
> and \~ as an accent character. It's only the absence of the former in 
> CMR that has led to defining it based on the latter, apparently.
>

Sounds right to me, too.

If you're releasing a new version, Ross, would this be a good time to 
change the package name? It's always seemed to me that it shouldn't 
really be "utf8accents", as it doesn't relate to UTF-8 (a Unicode 
encoding format); that would be the responsibility of a package that 
reads the raw input bytes, but XeTeX takes care of that itself. 
"unicodechars.sty", perhaps? (It's not just about accents any more, 
either.)

I seem to recall there was some discussion a while ago about whether 
this should be implemented at a different level, as a font encoding or 
something, but I don't remember the details, or know how feasible this 
would be. Whether or not you consider that, it's still a great resource 
for everyone.... thanks for providing it!

JK