On 5/21/06, Ricard Roca wrote:
Hi,
With ConTeXt and pdfTeX you can use \enableregime[utf] (utf8 encoding) with normal mode and math mode (no need to write \pm, \alpha or \times). But with ConTeXt and XeTeX you don't have to specify utf8 regime, because XeTeX can read utf8 directly. However, math mode in XeTeX is a different story ( 256 character tfm's are needed and so, and the encoding has to be ascii, so you have to write \pm, and ± doesn't work).
It would be nice if utf8 regime (using uni-xxx files) could be enabled only for math mode when using XeTeX, and so you would be able to input unicode characters in all modes (normal and math).
According to one of the recent threads you can most probably do something like this (I have to reboot first to try it out): \catcode±=\active \def±{\pm} There are actually two possibilities: 1. define a whole lot of active characters in the spirit of the above definition, then ConTeXt will render them OK (a matter of a slight redefinition of \enableregime macro or perhaps an additional macro to switch this option on or off) 2. better support for non-OpenType fonts in XeTeX. XeTeX currently does a very good job with OpenType. I guess that it would be doable that someone would tell to XeTeX which glyphs are present in a certain font/encoding (partially it could guess that alone) and then things could happen automatically even without defining active characters. (or a mixture of both) Also, ConTeXt can fake many characters if they are not present in the font. Without defining active characters this isn't possible since ConTeXt never sees them. Mojca