[XeTeX] IPA superscript diacritics

Ross Moore ross.moore at mq.edu.au
Wed Nov 10 05:35:12 CET 2010


Hi Kevin,

On 10/11/2010, at 1:23 PM, Kevin Russell wrote:

> 
> I've been using Acrobat 9.4 for Mac and Reader 9.1.2 for Mac (probably a higher point-version of Reader on my office computer).
> 
> It seems to be a Mac thing rather an age thing.  I just dug out an old XP laptop with Acrobat Reader *8*, and it behaved like you and Philip described.
> 
> Fortunately, our blind students are using Windows.  I know for sure one uses JAWS as his screenreader, and I suspect the others probably do as well.  JAWS can be set up to deal with various Unicode characters however they want (e.g., by reading out the Unicode character name), so as long as the right characters are in the PDF, things should work.   Their problems with reading my PDF files came from *really* botched tagging (post-XeLaTeX) -- I was incorrectly assuming that the magical ASCII-translation problems I got on my Macs were a subset of the problems they were getting.

The Mac software can do some pretty awful things under Copy/Paste,
in particular with mathematical symbols.

Perhaps the worst is that it treats the symbols \aleph, \beth, \gimel
and \daleth  as if they were in the Unicode Hebrew block.
This may sound fine at first encounter, but it means that an RTL switch
is also inserted --- with no following reversion to LTR !
So everything subsequent on the same line comes out in reverse order.  

> 
> Even though Reader works correctly under Windows, I don't suppose there's any chance that the "accessibility" tools in the Windows version of Acrobat are any better than the buggy, incoherent morass of unuseability that exists in the Mac version of CS4.  :-(
> 
> Thanks everyone for helping me narrow down where this particular problem was.
> 
> -- Kevin


Cheers,

	Ross

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ross Moore                                       ross.moore at mq.edu.au 
Mathematics Department                           office: E7A-419      
Macquarie University                             tel: +61 (0)2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia  2109                          fax: +61 (0)2 9850 8114
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