Re: [pdftex] Problem: testing MkIV on pdftex-t manual source

[Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha@web.de>]

On 20 April 2010 Wolfgang Schuster wrote:

 > Am 20.04.10 05:09, schrieb Richard Chan:
 > > I'm new to all this stuff - does MkIV build the pdftex manual?
 > >
 > > I ran into this problem running ConTeXt minimals on the pdftex 1.4
 > > manual sources
 > > context --mode=screen --result=TESTING pdftex-t:
 > >
 > >                                                    nh
 > > l.689 \PDFTEX\ is maintained by \THANH
 > >                                        , Martin Schr\"oder, Hans Hagen,
 > > Taco
 > > ?
 > >
 > > I could build the manual using texexec.
 > >    
 > Can you replace in the s-abr-01.tex file which is in the same folder as
 > the manual the defintion for \THANH with this one
 > 
 > \def\THANH{H\agrave n Th\ecircumflexacute\ Th\agrave n} % Hàn Thế Thành

This is definitely better than ....\llap{\raise 0.5ex\hbox.... 

The \kern/\raise macros worked fine in the good old times when nothing
else but Computer Modern was available.

What you are proposing makes sense if you are writing macros which are
supposed to work with any input encoding.  But within a particular
document you already know which input encoding you are using.  If it's
UTF-8, you don't need any macro at all.

I recently revised the VnTeX documentation (written in LaTeX).  UTF-8
is used as an input encoding there and whenever I had to write Thành's
name, I just typed "Hàn Thế Thành" instead of using a macro.

And why Martin Schr\"oder instead of Martin Schröder?  The last time I
wrote \"o instead of ö in a document was in 1994, just before LaTeX-2e
was released.  But both, LaTeX and Context, support UTF-8 now.  It
allows you to have text written in Vietnamese, Greek, Arabic, Chinese,
Devanagari... in one and the same TeX source file.

Anyway, whenever I see code like ...\llap{\raise 0.5ex\hbox..., the
first thing which comes to my mind is that more than 40 years ago
people entered the surface of the moon, and I'm wondering in which
world *we* are living. 

Regards,
  Reinhard

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