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On Sun, 13 Jan 2008 15:59:27 -0700, Hans Hagen
In luatex can I make a definition such that such that the string
U004C U0303 (l ̃)
is always treated as l with tilde above, taking into account italics and without using \~l (which does not work in, eg, footnote)?
What you want here is to support the Unicode combining characters, which isn't straightforward in TeX because according to the Standard, they come after the base letter they modify, while TeX's accent commands are, of course, typed before. So you can't simply make the combining characters active and equivalent to the appropriate accent macros.
if i know the precise specs i can build it into the utf collapser, which is way faster than dealing with tokens (mkiv will not have a token parser for the main input, at most for dedicated tasks)
This may be a good place to start: http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0/ch02.pdf see pages 48--54 don't know if this is precise enough... See also pp.~109--117 of http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0/ch03.pdf which seems even more precise. See also http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0/UnicodeBookIX.pdf under "combining" 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 -- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/