Re: TeX ligatures in XeTeX/LuaTeX: ``who needs them''?

[Willi Egger <w.egger@boede.nl>]

Hi Mojca,

On Dec 9, 2007, at 7:48 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> On Dec 9, 2007 5:07 PM, Willi Egger wrote:
>>> or even more weird ones:
>>>   !` -> inverted exclam
>>>   ?` -> inverted question
>>
>> For Spanish this is definitevely necessary. Again if coded in UTF
>> there is no problem.
>
> Do Spansh users still key them in like that (apart from old TeX-ies
> who have never heard abot anything beyond \v, \", \')? I mean: would
> anyone miss those two ligatures? (I assume that people need to use
> inverted quotation marks in Word as well ...)
>
I was not to the point on this and I misinterpreted your question.   
Sorry.
Indeed the well known coding of umlauts and alike with \"... should  
be there for sake of compatibility. - If those would vanish, this  
would mean for me to re-encode a couple of thousand pages ...
Coming back to the quotation-marks. IMHO one should stick to the  
\quote and \quotation constructs. This and only this allows you to  
change the appearance of the marks depending on a given language or  
adjust them to the style of a print-house/publisher. I would suggest  
not to make provisions in order to automatically convert ,, into „ .  
There will be consistency problems and the behaviour of Word i.e.  
that things happen while you have difficulty to control them.

> Ono problem is that that's a "well known" TeX behaviour though
> (documented in beginner's manual as well).
>
>>> Some ligatures are handy indeed:
>>>   -- -> endash
>>>   --- -> emdash
>>>   ' -> right single quote (I'm, isn't etc.)
>>
>> Sure this is important, I suggest to add the horizontal ellipsis
>
> \dots? But what if one decides to use, say, 10 dots in a row? That
> might lead to weird effects (non-evenly spaced dots). -- and --- have
> been well established, so one would be careful enough before writing
> "----------". And there's \dots, so that one could have been mapped to
> ellipsis if needed.
>
The ellipsis is typographically an important 'character'. So todays  
solution with \dots or \unknown is fine to me. When necessary one can  
adjust the kerning of the dots for style-purposes. Otherwise one  
could discuss to convert three consecutive dots (and only those) to  
the horizontal ellipsis in Unicode, which would look always better  
than three dots from the keyboard. Also here it is questionable  
whether to have automatic conversion. Again this is resembling Word  
and how to keep grip on what is happening.
IMHO the user who places an x-number of dots or dashes must know what  
he does. There might not be a generic solution for such cases.

Willi

> Thanks,
>     Mojca
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