[XeTeX] tex-text and more quotes

John Was john.was at ntlworld.com
Fri Aug 3 09:25:30 CEST 2007


Rather than having those responsible for updating XeTeX code trying to 
anticipate all the (pseudo-)ligatures that individual users might require, 
could we have some sort of primitive (e.g. \myligs) which would invoke a 
simple table of mappings (e.g. a file myligs.lig) that the user finds 
convenient:

(( -> \char'...... etc. (for true ligatures one would want the syntax to 
include instructions for deconsructing the ligature at end-line hyphenation 
points)

This would be analogous to the user-specific kerns that I suggested a while 
back (which I think JK thought was doable in principle).

Ideally it would be invoked as part of the options in the line calling a 
specific font so that other fonts in the document would not be affected.  It 
might be particularly useful for font-writeres creating (or trying to 
replicate) unusual ligatures - e.g. the rather beautiful Qu ligature in 
Centaur (handy if one is writing a book dealing with royalty), or the italic 
gy ligature in Baskerville (which was always used in volumes of the 
Oxyrhynchus Papyri when they were set in hot metal, as 'Egypt' comes up so 
often in book titles cited there).

Best

John



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Apostolos Syropoulos" <asyropoulos at yahoo.com>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2007 7:56 AM
Subject: JunkEmail: Re: [XeTeX] tex-text and more quotes


> >The question is: do your (or anyones') documents
>>contain << ,, or >> in text (not math) that would be rendered
>>incorrectly by the proposed change in tex-text? You can argue about
>>the inelegance of the system, but truthfully it's ugly to use `` '' --
>>and so on in the first place.
> I really do not understand why is it a problem to have more than one
> mapping file? I think this feature was introduced to allow flexibility.
> Otherwise, these "ligatures" would have been hard-wired into XeTeX
> iyself. I agree that it is ugly to use -- --- etc., but these "ligatures"
> are documented in every book, user manual, etc. on TeX, while the others
> are sort of recent developments. But if you do insist in this, then please 
> consider
> including (( and )) to expand to « and », respectively, since many Greek 
> TeX users
> use these "ligatures"...
> Regards,
> A.S.
>
>
> ****************************************************************
> *Apostolos Syropoulos                                          *
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