[XeTeX] Newbie Question: Accessing Glyph

[Khaled Hosny]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 04:46:50PM +0100, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
> 
> 
> Michiel Kamermans wrote:
> 
> >When switching from LaTeX to XeLaTeX, the first thing to realise is that
> >in XeLaTeX, you write your text in unicode, relying on the unicode way
> >of representing characters and character sequences. As such, the best
> >choice is to not "access glyphs" but to just put them directly in your
> >document: just use €, ſ, etc.
> 
> 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.

As one who never had a keyboard with a Euro sign or accented characters,
I totally agree. I see TeX "shorthands" as a sort of input method, as
long as it gets translated into proper Unicode some where before actual
rendering is done, I see no harm in using it. Of course if one uses such
characters extensively, direct Unicode input is a better choice (and one
then should have proper keyboard layout).

That being said, I think xunicode already does this.

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer