Hans Hagen said:
makes me wonder if we should have

   \chr{e"a'}

producing

   ëá

(using real combinings is ok already) which is trivial to implement so
for the fun of it i might as well add that

I think that it would be useful.  I use Unicode characters extensively in my ConTeXt input, but only because I edit it in Emacs and can set up keymaps that map to the Unicode characters in a way that I can actually remember.  I think that this would add an easily remembered way for people to add combining characters to their documents.  Sometimes a slightly more verbose way to do something is helpful when it is more easily remembered.  (Honestly, I can't remember the hex codes for any Unicode characters after you get out of the range that maps to plain ASCII

On Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 5:29 PM Hans Hagen <j.hagen@xs4all.nl> wrote:
On 2/5/2021 6:19 PM, Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:
>
> On 2/5/21 5:38 PM, Hans Hagen wrote:
>> etc ... the ones that make 'composed characters'. I think that anyone
>> who needs them uses utf . They can be in (say) m-oldschool.mkxl or so.
>>
>> Objections? Hurt feelings? Sentiments?
>
> No hurt feelings, but I know that in my bib files, there are a couple of
> old entries that still have these weird composed characters. So I'm fine
> with upgrading, but it would be nice if this could fail gracefully, with
> a nice and informative error message...
btw, something like that will never happen suddenly ... more a matter of
declaring them obsolete, maybe move them so a module that we could still
load by default and later maybe on demand

concerning bibtex files, that's another story ... in order to deal well
with sorting etc quite a bit of sanitizing already takes place there
(alan and i spent quite a bit of time on that); also there are ways to
define extra only-used-in-bibtex commands, so we could actually just
define them for bib stuff only

it's more about "what are the current habits" ... we have commands like
\" (which is kind of intuitive) but \r and \v and such fall in the
category, and there are more kind of accents than we currently have
commands for anyway

a similar discussion (and we already exchanged some mails about that)
are named glyphs ... we have quite some for latin, greek, cyrillic (like
\eacute) but how about the rest of unicode

makes me wonder if we should have

   \chr{e"a'}

producing

   ëá

(using real combinings is ok already) which is trivial to implement so
for the fun of it i might as well add that; i think most who deal with
languages that have characters other than ascii will input in the most
natural way so we're only talking of escapes for those who see accents
and such as noise (yes we do have accents in dutch)

(in mkii we already had utf so then we actually did much of the
transition but mkii is stone age in terms of software)

Hans

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