Re: Character names

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

Taco Hoekwater wrote:
> Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> >>\NC 0300 COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT \NC \textgrave           \NC \NR
> >>\NC 0309 COMBINING HOOK ABOVE   \NC \texthookabove       \NC \NR
> >>\NC 0303 COMBINING TILDE        \NC \texttilde           \NC \NR
> >>\NC 0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT \NC \textacute           \NC \NR
> >>\NC 0323 COMBINING DOT BELOW    \NC \textbottomdot       \NC \NR
> >
> > I may be wrong, but aren't those used only in combination with other
> > characters? I don't know if TeX (ConTeXt) can handle this (at least
> > not yet).
>
> If the format was <accent> <char>, that would work, but unicode
> specifies <char> <accent>, and that cannot be done without a special
> font encoding that uses lots of ligatures.

I thought so. But the issue is not a matter of font designers, but of
underlying software. If TeX can't "unget" a character and replace it
with the accented one, you can't ask font designers to add dozens of
ligatures. Knuth didn't write TeX with Unicode conventions in mind, so
I can understand that, I only wonder if XeTeX, Aleph [and exTeX]
support such accents.

I'll consider this as "leave Windows Vietnamese encoding unsupported"
(they have two other encodings anyway).

Thanks,
    Mojca