[XeTeX] Newbie Question: Accessing Glyph

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/13/2010 8:46 AM, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
> Much as I sympathise with, and understand, this Unicode-oriented 
> approach, it seems to me that in real life, and in the absence of a 
> universal keyboard which can conveniently and easily be used to enter 
> the myriad human languages that Unicode contains, the "traditional" 
> TeX way of entering diacritics (and characters beyond those found on 
> an English keyboard) is actually by far the most useful and usable.  
> If XeTeX does not currently have a macro set which allows all such 
> characters to be conveniently entered mnemonically (and \char "0123 
> doesn't count as mnemonic !), then I do think that there is a clear 
> case for its creation.

I can't speak for others, but if I need a rare character, I fire up 
BabelMap, look for the thing by name, and then insert it. Until a second 
ago, for instance, I had no idea what the unicode value for a lower case 
o with macron (ō) was (turns out it's U+014D), and I won't have to 
remember it either because every time I need it I'll just insert it into 
my text, to ensure it stays readable, even as TeX source.

Of course, if you use a specific character a lot you can bind it to a 
macro like \thatcharIconstantlyneed (but then named sensibly, of course) 
and use it that way, so I suppose I should have said "try to avoid using 
\char unless it's for a character that you use frequently and can't 
input in a simple manner, like via an "insert symbol" in your editor".

My personal prefernce is to try to keep the text as human readable as 
possible. Because putting in a macro for a letter makes the source 
harder to read ("jōhō" is human readable, "j{\omacron}h{\omacron}" is 
not, for instance; or using "deʃign" instead of "de{\esch}ign") the 
small effort for infrequent characters usually pays off when revisiting 
a text. But it does require more discipline to stick with that mode of 
writing!

(Of course this does not apply to typesetting, say, medieval text that 
requires both regular and long s in specific places. Then one would 
reach for a package that lets you type normally and picks the right 
version of s, ſ or ʃ for you)

- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com