Re: composing commands

[Hans Hagen <j.hagen@xs4all.nl>]

On 2/5/2021 6:19 PM, Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:
> 
> On 2/5/21 5:38 PM, Hans Hagen wrote:
>> 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?
> 
> No hurt feelings, but I know that in my bib files, there are a couple of 
> old entries that still have these weird composed characters. So I'm fine 
> with upgrading, but it would be nice if this could fail gracefully, with 
> a nice and informative error message...
btw, something like that will never happen suddenly ... more a matter of 
declaring them obsolete, maybe move them so a module that we could still 
load by default and later maybe on demand

concerning bibtex files, that's another story ... in order to deal well 
with sorting etc quite a bit of sanitizing already takes place there 
(alan and i spent quite a bit of time on that); also there are ways to 
define extra only-used-in-bibtex commands, so we could actually just 
define them for bib stuff only

it's more about "what are the current habits" ... we have commands like 
\" (which is kind of intuitive) but \r and \v and such fall in the 
category, and there are more kind of accents than we currently have 
commands for anyway

a similar discussion (and we already exchanged some mails about that) 
are named glyphs ... we have quite some for latin, greek, cyrillic (like 
\eacute) but how about the rest of unicode

makes me wonder if we should have

   \chr{e"a'}

producing

   ëá

(using real combinings is ok already) which is trivial to implement so 
for the fun of it i might as well add that; i think most who deal with 
languages that have characters other than ascii will input in the most 
natural way so we're only talking of escapes for those who see accents 
and such as noise (yes we do have accents in dutch)

(in mkii we already had utf so then we actually did much of the 
transition but mkii is stone age in terms of software)

Hans

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
               Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
        tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://context.aanhet.net
archive  : https://bitbucket.org/phg/context-mirror/commits/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________