[XeTeX] Character Variants

[mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Sun, 27 Mar 2011, David Perry wrote:
> character.  You can enter characters by number in XeTeX with \char"XXXX; so
> try
>
> \char"8FBB\char"E0100

If it's just a question of getting in the characters, which the font will
then process by glyph substitution, it should work to simply include the
desired characters literally in XeTeX's input.  I haven't tried that with
variant selectors, but it works for me with private-use characters, even
outside the Basic Multilingual Plane.  I tried to demonstrate in this
message, only to discover when I attempted to send it, that my *email
server* doesn't support the literal characters even if XeTeX, my editor,
my keyboard config, and my email client all do.

The advantage to using the literal characters is that if your editor
display supports them, they will appear more nicely during editing; the
advantage to using \char" escapes is that then the input remains in ASCII
and will better survive passage through systems (like email) that may
not support the literal characters.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/