[XeTeX] tex-text and more quotes

[Hans Hagen]

Thomas Hühn wrote:
> Apostolos Syropoulos schrieb:
>> I believe these additional mappings are practically useless and here is why:
> 
> I dearly missed those mappings, just a few days ago.
> 
>> when one uses a native keyboard she should be able to get these extra characters by
>> pressings certain keys.  It seems to me that XeTeX provides more than enough.
> 
> Show me a keyboard that has „
> 
> The German mapping does not have this.
> 
> Via Compose in X it is possible, but few people have set that up and are
> acquainted with that. And how do you do it in Windows?
> 
> And why don't you demand the removal of those other, existing
> "shortcuts" like ---? Or the other quote characters?
> 
> If people want to use in their native language using sound typography,
> they shall go the painful way, otherwise they don't appreciate it?
> 
> There are several people (many, I guess) who consider such mappings a
> huge help. And there is you who hasn't presented any arguments except
> "it can be done in another way". Maybe you could elaborate why you think
> it's a bad idea to make life easier for us?

since the documents are coded for tex and not arbitrary word processors, 
  features like this don't hurt, although it makes sense (somewhere in 
the preamble of your document) to make a note that you expect e.g. >> to 
be replaced by a right guillemot (the tex-text directive is a good 
indicator)

btw, many of these multiple -> one character mappings are not really 
ligatures, although they use tex's ligature mechanism to achieve this

here is about what you expect in tex related fonts (say lmr)

exclam     + quoteleft  => exclamdown
question   + quoteleft  => questiondown

less       + less       => guillemotleft
greater    + greater    => guillemotright

I          + J          => IJ
f          + f          => ff
f          + i          => fi
f          + l          => fl
f          + k          => fk
ff         + i          => ffi
ff         + l          => ffl
i          + j          => ij

comma      + comma      => quotedblbase
quoteleft  + quoteleft  => quotedblleft
quoteright + quoteright => quotedblright

hyphen     + hyphen     => endash
endash     + hyphen     => emdash

btw, if i remember right, in afm2tfm there are also combinations with 
space, which is interesting because tex has no space

Hans


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