[XeTeX] Automate table creation

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/3/1 Bruno Le Floch <blflatex at gmail.com>:
> As Tobias mentions, use a package for loops. I think the code below
> should work, but I don't know how to build diacritics on a letter:
> isn't the point of combining marks that just putting the two
> characters next to each other should do the trick? I didn't test.
>
It depends on how the font is built. First, the accent must not be
centered geometrically but optically. Moreover, you cannot just build
the characters from the base character and an accent, it was shown by
typographers centuries ago. you need at least a different accent for
lowercase and different for uppercase letters. you can see it on high
quality commercial fonts from www.stormtype.com (Czech fonts by F.
Štorm). The accented characters should preferably be drawn as glyphs.
Substitution of a combining diacritical mark + base letter to an
accented letter can be achieved by GSUB tables but I am not sure
whether such tables exist in all fonts. You can also switch the
Unicode normalization in XeTeX, it should probably work too.

> \documentclass{article}
> \usepackage{xparse}
> \ExplSyntaxOn
> \DeclareDocumentCommand{\maketable}{mm}
>  {
>    \use:x { \noexpand\begin{tabular}{*{\clist_length:n{#2}}} }
>    \clist_map_inline:nn {#2} { & ##1 }
>    \clist_map_inline:nn {#1}
>      {
>         \\
>         ##1
>         \clist_map_inline:nn {#2}
>            { & \build_diacritic:nn {##1} {####1} }
>      }
>    \end{tabular}
>  }
> \cs_new_protected:Npn \build_diacritic:nn #1#2 {#1#2} % dunno?
> \ExplSyntaxOff
> \begin{document}
> \maketable{^,`}{a,b,c}
> \end{document}
>
> On 3/1/12, Tobias Schoel <liesdiedatei at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Look for looping packages, e.g. multido and pgffor. pgffor's foreach
>> command seems to be quite suitable, except I haven't yet made it work
>> inside tabulars.
>>
>> On 01.03.2012 04:27, Aleksandr Andreev wrote:
>>> Hello everybody,
>>>
>>> I am wondering if someone could guide me as to how to create a macro
>>> in XeTeX that will do the following.
>>>
>>> Background: I'm creating some files that demonstrate whether or not
>>> OpenType features are correctly implemented in a font (for now, I am
>>> only concerned with the correct positioning of diacritics). For this,
>>> I would like to create a set of tables.
>>> Across the columns of the table, I will have the diacritic marks; for
>>> illustrative purposes, let's say they are U+0300, U+0301 and U+0311,
>>> etc. (the actual file will have about 20 such marks)
>>>
>>> Down the rows, I am putting characters, say U+0410 (Cyrillic A),
>>> U+0415 (Cyrillic Ie), etc, about 50 total, not necessarily contiguous
>>> within Unicode.
>>>
>>> In each cell of the Table, all I need is to combine the character and
>>> the diacritic.
>>>
>>> So, for example, I'll have:
>>>
>>> begin{tabular}
>>>   &  ̀&  ́ \\
>>> A&  À&  Á \\
>>> etc.
>>>
>>> Here's the question: is there any way to write a TeX macro to build
>>> this table automatically -- i.e., I feed it the list of characters and
>>> diacritics, and it creates the Table? Basically, I'm being lazy and
>>> not wanting to type out the entire 50x20 table.
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>>
>>> Aleksandr
>
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz