[XeTeX] Re: Unicode/font mixing

[Simon Spiegel]

> > Thank you for your answer. Maybe this is a naive question, but how 
> are
> > people supposed to deal with this sitation. I thought one of the main
> > points of Unicode is that you don't have to change encoding all the
> > time.
>
> You don't have to change *encoding*; but you may still need to change
> *font*, as there is no font that supports every character in Unicode.

Yeah, that's what I meant, unprecise wording…
>
> >  If I have to manually change the used font, everytime I use a
> > non-Latin glyph, I don't see much advantage?
>
>
> >  Or do I have just have restrict myself to the few fonts which 
> support
> > a great of Unicode glyphs if I want XeLaTeX to behave this way? One 
> of
> > the reason I'm asking this is because BibDesk is getting unicode
> > support, which would allow me to enter non-Latin characters directly
> > into bibTeX files (bibtex is kind of encoding agnostic). How are 
> other
> > people handling this situation?
>
> At the moment, I typically mark fragments in non-Latin languages using
> shorthand commands created to suit the occasion; e.g., {\ar some Arabic
> text} or {\dn Devanagari}. But I'm not a LaTeX user (much), nor a
> BibDesk user (at all), so I'm not the one to comment on the best
> approach there.
>
> There have been requests in the past for a way to, in effect, declare
> several "current fonts" each covering a different Unicode range, so
> that mixed-script text wouldn't require explicit font changes. This is
> an interesting possibility, but coming up with a design that would
> reliably do "the right thing", especially with characters such as
> punctuation or numerals that may be "shared" between scripts, is not a
> trivial thing.
>
This certainly looks an extremely useful feature to me. I do realize 
that you do probably have other priorities, but if you should ever run 
out of work, this seems like a great thing to do. ;)

cheers

simon

--
Simon Spiegel
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