On Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:53:40 -0600, Mojca Miklavec
On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 1:57 AM, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد
Sometimes I use the following for simple substitutions:
\defineactivecharacter ' {\otfchar{quoteright}}
But is there a more general mechanism to do things
\definesubstitution{<string1>}{<string2>}
eg
\definesubstitution{--}{–}
Of course ConTeXt already provides this particular substitution
In mkii it doesn't. Fonts do that substitution. In mkiv a hack is applied to fonts (not to TeX macros), so that this particular substitution works.
Hmm, so this is much more complicated than I thought...
but I'm interested in such a mechanism for more general purposes.
In mkii this is not possible, except with some ugly hacks. You can easily substitute a single character by making it active. To substitute whole words, you either need to modify fonts, or write some dirty macros.
I see. In any case, mkii is "obsolete" for my purposes, if/when I get to writing a book on ConTeXt it will cover mkiv only.
In mkiv you can either apply some "patches" to fonts (search for tlig in ConTeXt source, for example font-otf.lua, also, there are some fea files in fonts/fea/context capable of doing that), or change input text while reading/digesting some TeX file.
tlig was buggy, but it works in the latest beta. Thank you, Hans!
Hans and Taco can probably tell you more.
And Thank you, Mojca! Idris -- Professor Idris Samawi Hamid, Editor-in-Chief International Journal of Shi`i Studies Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523