Re: A few questions (mostly about fonts)

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

On 8/16/06, Jeff Smith wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I'm fairly new to ConTeXt (which I greatly admire, by the way) and
> after reading a couple of provided manuals, I have some lingering
> questions. I thank anyone in advance for replying to any number of
> them.
>
> The fonts manual mentions how TeX is often qualified as 'the font
> mess'. Well, yeah, my head hurts right now... :-( Here are some
> font-related issues that are very important to me:

Some of the font mess might disappear when the new pdfTeX comes out
(next year). If you're a font fan and if you're in a hurry, you might
try XeTeX (it supports Unicode & OpenType fonts, which are much easier
to use than if you want to install your own font into TeX tree and use
it with standard pdfTeX), but when I last tried it, it didn't support
inclusion of external figures on Windows. (I don't know if Hans has
included it into the standalone Windows version already.)

> a) Somehow I can't come up with small caps in a Times font. Is this
> normal? This happens either by using \sc or \setupcapitals[sc=yes]
> along with \cap.

Left for someone else to answer.

> b) LaTeX has a package for the International Phonetic Alphabet called
> tipa. Is it possible to use it in ConTeXt? If not, can anybody point
> me to the relevant manuals that will help me incorporate official IPA
> fonts (say, the TTF version) in my ConTeXt installation? I'm using the
> stand-alone Windows distribution, btw.

It's not there yet, but as far as I can remember someone (probably
Taco?, I might be wrong) was willing to help incorporating it if one
of the users would describe what exactly is neeeded and help testing
it.

(with XeTeX and a proper OpenType font you would probably get them
out-of-the-box)

> Two language related issues:
>
> c) There was a French language specific package in LaTeX that made
> possible the direct use of accented characters in the source text
> (like é, à, ô) without using the explicit commands themselves. Can
> this be achieved in ConTeXt (because right now their direct use simply
> halts the compiling)? I would believe so, since the manual for French
> documents by Peter Münster shows how to set up automatic spacing
> before the strong punctuation marks (! ? ; :) without explicit
> commands every time. I'm guessing the strategy would be the same with
> accented characters, but so far I haven't been able to make it work.
>
> d) Is it possible to build some sort of macro that would automatically
> make \quotation marks different when inside another \quotation
> command? Basically, we use « » (the French guillemets) as standard
> quotation marks, but we use single quotes instead inside another
> quotation. At this point, I'd only need a yes or no answer. It would
> ease my mind to know there can be a way to streamline this usage of
> quotation marks, thereby simplifying greatly the input text.

The answer to both questions:

\enableregime[utf-8] % or latin9/iso-8859-15 or cp1252
\mainlanguage[fr]

See lang-ita.tex. I didn't understand which quotes exactly you want to
have, but if you want the english ones for some reason:

\setuplanguage[fr]
   [leftquote=\upperleftsinglesixquote,
    rightquote=\upperrightsingleninequote]

Mojca