Re: substitutions

["Idris Samawi Hamid" <ishamid@colostate.edu>]

On Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:46:21 -0600, Mojca Miklavec  
<mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد  
> wrote:
>>
>> I would like to be able to do things like
>>
>> Mohamed -> Muḥammad
>>
>> which would save me a lot of time in proofreading, editing, etc.
>
> It's easy to write a simple ruby/perl(or even lua) script that will do
> such changes for you *before* typesetting articles. That's probably
> much better, since you also want to have clean sources at some point.

Yes, but the above is just one kind of example. Indeed, what I am thinking  
of is just an extension of the kind of configurability texies like to do.  
For your average user -- or a secretary -- we don't want to have to point  
them to lua or ruby etc...

> Of course, writing the list of substitutions still needs to be done by
> you, but that's in either case.
>
> If you need that, write kind-of-specification how you would like to
> use such a command.

Maybe I misunderstand... I could see something like I mentioned in the  
original mail

\definesubstitution{<string1>}{<string2>}

or even a database approach:

\definesubstitutions[
<string1>,<string1'>|
<string2>,<string2'>|
<string3>,<string3'>
]

Here is another example. I generally prefer an en-dash padded with spaces  
-- and with a no-break space after -- to an em-dash for parenthetical  
constructions. So I would like to do, eg

\definesubstitution{<emdash>}{ <endash>~}

Again, this saves time in extensive editing, and I can stay in TeX without  
fiddling so much with scripting, CTRL-F/H/R etc. It maintains control in  
case I change my mind and want to revert etc. For long documents and  
projects this gets unwieldy pretty fast and I end up with lots of typos  
etc.

I guess we could get really funky and add a regular expressions engine  
using lua:

\definesubstitution[regex]{<string1>}{<string2>}

And I'm sure Hans, Taco, and other programmers can think of other nifty  
macros...

But the basic functionality would suffice for now :-)

Best wishes
Idris

-- 
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid, Editor-in-Chief
International Journal of Shi`i Studies
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523

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