Re: composing commands

[Otared Kavian <otared@gmail.com>]

Hi Hans,

I agree that nowadays most composed characters can be input directly from the keyboard (at least judging from my experience with MacOS), but nevertheless it may happen that one uses an old file used as an input source file (for instance extracting a math exercise from a database) in which there are old fashion composed characters. It would be hard to go back and replace those characters in each file.
Besides, with the traditional plain TeX composed characters something like

\"c

would give a correct result (the character c with a kind of umlaut on top of it), but this cannot be input from the keyboard (and maybe it does not exist at all in UTF…). (Actually I just tried \"c with LMTX and mkiv and it does not give what is expected from TeX… I am sure it did work some years ago :-) )

If, as you suggest, such composed characters maybe used at the cost of saying at the beginning of one's file:
	\usemodule[oldschool]
then there is no real harm in removing composing commands, although I am not an enthusiastic supporter of removing them.

Best regards: Otared K.

> On 5 Feb 2021, at 17:38, Hans Hagen <j.hagen@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> As I'm going over the commands in lmtx, I wonder if we should keep
> 
> \c
> \d
> \k
> \r
> \u
> \v
> 
> \"
> \'
> \`
> \^
> 
> etc ... the ones that make 'composed characters'. I think that anyone who needs them uses utf . They can be in (say) m-oldschool.mkxl or so.
> 
> Objections? Hurt feelings? Sentiments?
> 
> Hans
> 
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