[XeTeX] Unicode-named macros in XeTeX

[Bogdan Butnaru]

Hello everyone! This might be a silly question, but  please be gentle.
I honestly tried to find and answer and failed.

I’m writing a document using XeTeX (mainly for its ease of accessing
TTF fonts) and with the package xunicode to allow me to type Unicode
characters easily—for several reasons it’s considerably more
convenient for me to have things like curly quotes and the various
dashes typed directly rather than as \commands.

However, I’m not satisfied with the way em-dashes behave in this
setup. I’d like to define a macro that does what I want (e.g. control
spacing and line breaking around the dash), but I want to call by just
typing an em-dash, i.e. just “—” instead of “\dash”.

I anticipate the problem of having to actually generate the em-dash
character instead of recursively calling the em-dash macro inside the
macro, so please mention this if you have a solution for me, but I’m
already stumped at the “how to call a macro ‘—’” part.

(By the way, the *main* thing I want to do is allow line breaks after
an em-dash, but not before; XeTeX doesn’t allow line breaks after an
em-dash unless I specifically tell it to after each one. If there’s a
significantly simpler way of achieving this please do let me know.)

-- Bogdan Butnaru