[XeTeX] mapping=tex-text and weird ligatures

[James Crippen]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 23:04, Will Robertson <wspr81 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18/06/2008, at 5:05 PM, James Cloos wrote:
>
>> I can get [dashes] under X11 as well, using
>> <Multi_Key><dash><dash><period>
>> and <Multi_Key><dash><dash><dash>, but cannot tell the difference
>> between the – and — glyphs in my editor's font
>
> Yes, this is SO frustrating. I wish that code editors would start taking
> more notice of the various characters that they current have incredibly poor
> support for (e.g., visible differences between the large handful of
> different spacing glyphs in unicode, and so on).
>
> I'd be very happy if the en-dash mapped to a 1.5-charwidth wide glyph in a
> double-width character and the em-dash mapped to a full double-width
> character. Or we could just stop using fixed width fonts for our code :)

Monaco, one of the monospace fonts I use, has a slight difference
between en-dash and em-dash which is visible if it's antialiased. The
hyphen looks normal, the en-dash has no space on either side and is
somewhat bolder, and the em-dash is obviously thinner and almost
invisible. I can't usually tell them apart at a glance, but typing any
of the others next to one gets me an answer.

I don't think monospace font designers ever consider issues like this
because they don't expect people to *want* to use the different
dashes. Which is naïve, but still. A little effort to differentiate
them as is done in Monaco would help a lot. Those of you using open
source monospace fonts should point this out to the developers.

To be honest, I do all my serious editing in TeXShop nowadays and use
Lucida Grande, which is a proportional font. I need it because none of
the monospace fonts out there support all the rare glyphs I use in
linguistics, particularly where I use a couple of combining diacritics
on a single base character. Laying out tables in a readable fashion
can be annoying, particularly since TeXShop has a bug in its tab stop
handling in the editor, but once you get used to using a proportional
font it's not bad. If I'm editing hairy TeX macros, however, I'll
switch to a different editor (vim or Smultron) and use a monospace
font so I can see how many spaces I've got following some command.