Re: composing commands

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

On 2/5/2021 11:21 PM, Otared Kavian wrote:
> 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

indeed, not in unicode ... so unlikely dealt with in fonts (i could of 
course support it as in mkii but in over a decade no one complained so ...)

> 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 :-) )

never call a diaeresis an umlaut and vise versa ... some texies can get 
very emotional about that ... and you don't want to know how long 
winding and boring discussions about the distance between the base 
character and the accent can/has/might be (i remember some discussion 
about the umlaut being lower positioned given its historis origin, it 
being tiny letters) ... often discussions focused on computer modern 
because that was kind of under control (we had plenty of variants for 
each language, which is interesting because they actually could be in 
one font, but that (a new encoding as part of texgyre) happened just 
before we all went unicode and before the european union became larger

> 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.
Well, that why I ask.

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
___________________________________________________________________________________