[XeTeX] xunicode.sty -- pinyin and TIPA shortcuts

[Will Robertson]

Ross Moore wrote:
> Will Robertson wrote:
>
>> On the other hand, where do you draw the line between accessing  
>> unicode characters/accents with glyphs and lots of intricate  
>> shorthands?
>
> Does such a line even need to be drawn ?

:)
Perhaps not.

I'm possibly more in favour of a more modular approach, in which  
people who want XeTeX/LaTeX TIPA support can load a package for it.  
On the other hand, perhaps a monolithic package makes it easier for  
people to find what they want.

> There is another side to  xunicode.sty  that hasn't been fully
> developed yet: ...
>
> If this is done, then it may become desirable to re-read  xunicode.sty
> several times, so as to 'Declare' the desired behaviour of the macros
> with the different encodings.
> This is different to what normally happens with LaTeX packages, where
> there is only ever a need to read it once to get the definitions.

Except for fontenc.sty :)

> Alternatively, all the \Declare...  lines could be moved into separate
> files, devoted to particular ranges of Unicode points.
> This would be more like Babel, with its .ldf  files.

I think I'm in favour of this, for reasons stated above. Especially  
if the goal is for backwards compatibility, it makes little sense,  
say, adding macros to obtain Cyrillic characters (see Jonathan's  
cyrunicode.sty floating around somewhere) which will only be useful  
for legacy packages/documents that encode text with such methods.

But it would be good to provide a formal method and place to obtain  
such things.

(One other advantage to this method is the possibility of re-reading  
the input files with different macro expansions in the documentation  
to get automatically typeset character tables, as I've done for  
xmaths.sty.)

Will