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

[Robert Spence]

Dear Pavel,

On 08 Apr 2006, at 09:47 , Pavel Stranak wrote:

> I might be wrong, but I always thought that the greatest thing in  
> whole Unicode use is that if one wants to have "LATIN SMALL LETTER  
> SCRIPT G" in the output, he types exactly this character (0x0261)  
> in the input file.

You're right, of course.  The best approach is simply to download the  
IPA SIL keyboard and install it, so the glyphs shown on the keys in  
the Keyboard Viewer really do correspond to the Unicode characters  
that you're inputting and XeTeX is going to be outputting.  But after  
years of switching daily between German and English keyboard layouts  
I find the "idealized" keyboard I now have in my head when I'm typing  
is a kind of unreal composite---German umlauts where they should be  
for German (unless I happen to want one of the non-German characters  
at the time...); everything else as for English, except that shift-2  
would give me double quotation marks as in German (except when typing  
email addresses), and Y and Z are always (regardless of the language)  
in accordance with the German keyboard layout, instead of the English!

Eagerly awaiting the advent of computers with voice recognition  
systems instead of keyboards (...except in holodeck simulations for  
nostalgia buffs...)

Regards,
-- Rob Spence