Re: substitutions

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

On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 1:57 AM, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد wrote:
> Dear gang,
>
> Sometimes I use the following for simple substitutions:
>
> \defineactivecharacter  '  {\otfchar{quoteright}}
>
> But is there a more general mechanism to do things
>
> \definesubstitution{<string1>}{<string2>}
>
> eg
>
> \definesubstitution{--}{–}
>
> Of course ConTeXt already provides this particular substitution

In mkii it doesn't. Fonts do that substitution. In mkiv a hack is
applied to fonts (not to TeX macros), so that this particular
substitution works.

> but I'm
> interested in such a mechanism for more general purposes.

In mkii this is not possible, except with some ugly hacks. You can
easily substitute a single character by making it active. To
substitute whole words, you either need to modify fonts, or write some
dirty macros.

In mkiv you can either apply some "patches" to fonts (search for tlig
in ConTeXt source, for example font-otf.lua, also, there are some fea
files in fonts/fea/context capable of doing that), or change input
text while reading/digesting some TeX file.

Hans and Taco can probably tell you more.

Mojca
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