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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 -----------------------------------------------------------------