[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Philipp Stephani]

Am 28.09.2010 um 02:20 schrieb David J. Perry:

> As a relative newcomer to Xe(La)TeX, and proponent of Unicode and multilingual computing for 15+ years, I was very surprised by the lack of Unicode support in the TeX world.  I think what lshort and other tutorials need is a very clear and unbiased explanation of this situation.

I wholeheartedly agree.

>  Something along these lines:
>   What is Unicode?  How is it different from traditional TeX?
>   Why has TeX been slow to adopt Unicode?  (TeX is a standardized system that predates Unicode; has good tools for math typsetting that meet the needs of many users)

...and is was programmed by an English-speaking mathematician, primarily for the needs of English-speaking mathematicians. If you write a mathematical paper in English, there will be only three kinds of non-ASCII characters:
- Typographic characters such as “, — or …, for which TeX (ab)uses ligatures or macros
- Math characters, for which TeX has mathchardefs, special font encodings and macros
- A few number of accented characters to typeset author names from “foreign” countries, for which the \accent primitive suffices

>   Who needs Unicode + TeX now?  (multilingual users mostly, also those who want a larger variety of fonts and OT/AAT support, and the ability to easily interchange data with software outside the traditional TeX orbit; math users probably don't, since Unicode math is still developing)

I'd even say everybody needs it or should need it, just like everybody needs Unicode-aware operating systems, text editors, browsers, etc. It has finally become normal to be able to enter every character everywhere; lack of Unicode support is a severe flaw nowadays.