[XeTeX] VIQR pre-processor wrotten in (Xe)TeX ?

[Quang Minh Nguyen]

Hi there,

It might be slightly off topic, but wouldn't it be simpler to enter
unicode directly into your tex file?  After all, we're using xetex.

I can see the usefulness of creating a mapping for the long term, as a
general tool.  It would be of great help if one uses a text editor
that doesn't support unicode.  For that matter, doing something
similar for TELEX or VNI should be an added goal.

But back to Philip's original problem (of typesetting a restaurant
menu), I would do that by entering unicode directly.  For example on
my mac, I would choose VIQR as an input method and type the
multilingual text directly in texworks, texshop, or emacs (aquamacs),
and declare an appropriate font in my tex file.

Sorry for not providing insights about the mapping issue.  Best,
Minh
--
Nguyễn Quang Minh || 阮光明




> Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:11:40 +1100
> From: Ross Moore <ross.moore at mq.edu.au>
> To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms <xetex at tug.org>
> Subject: Re: [XeTeX] VIQR pre-processor wrotten in (Xe)TeX ?
> Message-ID: <AA642A15-45D2-4597-8157-5FC209FADE07 at mq.edu.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Hi Andrew, and Phil,
>
> On 25/11/2011, at 9:38 AM, Andrew Cunningham wrote:
>
>> Word final vowels with punctuation following, e.g. full stop, question mark.
>>
>> the following sentence:
>>
>> T?i y?u ti?ng n??c t?i t? khi m?i ra ??i.
>>
>> is represented in strict VIQR as:
>>
>> To^i ye^u tie^'ng nu+o+'c to^i tu+` khi mo+'i ra ddo+`i\.
>>
>> Notice the escaping of the full stop at the end of the sentence.
>> Without the escaping the full stop would be converted to diacritic
>> below the letter "i".
>
> What a pain for TeX, which already uses  '\.' to put
> a dot-below accent on a character.
>
>
> At least here we have \.<space>  (since '.' has catcode 12, not 11).
> So it should be possible to modify the definition of \.{ } within
> the NFSS processing of \.  to assign a special meaning.
> This is coding that could be easily included within Xunicode.sty ,
> but applied only optionally, according to encoding or within a font-switch.
>
> You would need that user code of  \.<space>  and equivalently \.{ }
> should expand to a sequence of:
>   '\' + '.'  each with catcode 12  followed by a space.
> Then your TecKit .map patterns can be defined to respect this.
>
> There will be problems when \. is meant to be used as a symbolic
> separator for other purposes; e.g. as a decimal point,
> or something like:  <word>\.<word>   (for whatever purpose).
> Or at the end of a block of characters with no trailing space.
>
> An alternative may be to define some other way to get the '\'
> with catcode 12.
>
> Or within environments that want to use VIQR data, the \catcode
> of '\' is set to 12, with some other character ('|' say) becoming
> TeX's category 0  escape-character.
>
> This is probably best, as you'll need to define such environments
> anyway. However, it makes it awkward to pass VIQR strings around
> within the arguments of macros.
>
>
>>
>> or another example:
>>
>> Anh ddi dda^u\?
>>
>> This escaping is part of VIQR and any input system that is based on VIQR.
>
> Offhand I cannot think of any alternative meaning assigned to \? .
> Is there one, in any special language, implemented in (La)TeX ?
>
>
>>
>>
>> Andrew
>> --
>> Andrew Cunningham
>> Senior Project Manager, Research and Development
>> Vicnet
>> State Library of Victoria
>> Australia
>>
>> andrewc at vicnet.net.au
>> lang.support at gmail.com
>
>
> Hope this helps,
>
>        Ross
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Ross Moore                                       ross.moore at mq.edu.au
> Mathematics Department                           office: E7A-419
> Macquarie University                             tel: +61 (0)2 9850 8955
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