TeX ligatures in XeTeX/LuaTeX: ``who needs them''?
Hello, just wondering: how many ConTeXt-ers depend on ligatures such as: '' (double quote) and '' (two single quotes) -> right double quote `` -> left double quote ,, -> DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK or even more weird ones: !` -> inverted exclam ?` -> inverted question << -> LEFT POINTING GUILLEMET (never heard of that ligature)
-> RIGHT POINTING GUILLEMET
Some ligatures are handy indeed: -- -> endash --- -> emdash ' -> right single quote (I'm, isn't etc.) I'm posting that question to get some feedback about which ones are expected to work/are fundamental for XeTeX & LuaTeX, so that others might be dropped from default additional font features (for third-party fonts). (I'm thinking about replacing tex-text in XeTeX with something: - more minimalistic - compatible with mkiv. Of course, users are still free to provide "tex-text" mapping explicitely as it's probably going to hang aound forever, together with XeTeX itself.) Mojca
On Sat, 8 Dec 2007, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
just wondering: how many ConTeXt-ers depend on ligatures such as: '' (double quote) and '' (two single quotes) -> right double quote `` -> left double quote
In some old documents. In newer documents I use \quote and \quotation. Then there are documents that need to move back and forth between latex and context but for them I can easily define appropriate macros in latex.
,, -> DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
or even more weird ones: !` -> inverted exclam ?` -> inverted question << -> LEFT POINTING GUILLEMET (never heard of that ligature)
-> RIGHT POINTING GUILLEMET
I have never used them.
Some ligatures are handy indeed: -- -> endash --- -> emdash
I use them all the time. Even though the utf encoded values can work here, my editor (vim) using fixed width fonts, so it is easy to miss the difference between hypehn, endash, and emdash (in the markup). So, I would prefer them to be present.
' -> right single quote (I'm, isn't etc.)
I can automate the conversion of ' to the corresponding utf character inside vim, so this is not really essential. However, IMO this should not change. Aditya
Hello Aditya, thanks a lot for your opinion :) On Dec 8, 2007 11:26 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:
On Sat, 8 Dec 2007, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
In some old documents. In newer documents I use \quote and \quotation. Then there are documents that need to move back and forth between latex and context but for them I can easily define appropriate macros in latex.
To be honest: I never had the slightest idea how to get proper (Slovenian, "lower nine double quote") quotation marks in LaTeX (or what's the suggested way to do it :). That's why I now use \def\quotation#1{...} in LaTeX as well (in case I need to fix other people's stuff).
Some ligatures are handy indeed: -- -> endash --- -> emdash
I use them all the time. Even though the utf encoded values can work here, my editor (vim) using fixed width fonts, so it is easy to miss the difference between hypehn, endash, and emdash (in the markup). So, I would prefer them to be present.
' -> right single quote (I'm, isn't etc.)
I can automate the conversion of ' to the corresponding utf character inside vim, so this is not really essential. However, IMO this should not change.
Sure. Those three replacements/ligatures were not under a question. They should stay, IMO. Mojca
Am 2007-12-09 um 00:10 schrieb Mojca Miklavec:
In some old documents. In newer documents I use \quote and \quotation. Then there are documents that need to move back and forth between latex and context but for them I can easily define appropriate macros in latex.
To be honest: I never had the slightest idea how to get proper (Slovenian, "lower nine double quote") quotation marks in LaTeX (or what's the suggested way to do it :). That's why I now use \def\quotation#1{...} in LaTeX as well (in case I need to fix other people's stuff).
Since I found ConTeXt (did only 1 LaTeX project before), I’m using \quote/\quotation IMO we are allowed to force ConTeXt users to use that or proper characters.
Some ligatures are handy indeed: -- -> endash --- -> emdash
' -> right single quote (I'm, isn't etc.)
Sure. Those three replacements/ligatures were not under a question. They should stay, IMO.
+1 from me, there seems to be no alternative if your keyboard mapping doesn’t allow to input such directly. (Even if I like to encourage people to write their own enhanced keymaps if theirs doesn’t contain what they need – my one gives me all European characters except Cyrillic ’cause I don’t need it...) Greetlings from Lake Constance! Hraban --- http://www.fiee.net/texnique/ http://wiki.contextgarden.net https://www.cacert.org (I’m an assurer)
On Sat, 8 Dec 2007 17:26:48 -0500 (EST)
Aditya Mahajan
On Sat, 8 Dec 2007, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
just wondering: how many ConTeXt-ers depend on ligatures such as: '' (double quote) and '' (two single quotes) -> right double quote `` -> left double quote
In some old documents. In newer documents I use \quote and \quotation. Then there are documents that need to move back and forth between latex and context but for them I can easily define appropriate macros in latex.
,, -> DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
We should jeep them for old times sake although I prefer quote and quotation in my document because this is more flexible (change with the language and I can also change the quotation style).
or even more weird ones: !` -> inverted exclam ?` -> inverted question << -> LEFT POINTING GUILLEMET (never heard of that ligature)
-> RIGHT POINTING GUILLEMET
I have never used them.
The two spain ligatures should vanish, I tried once to write [...]?`` in one of my documents and hated this behaviour. The other two ligatures for guillemets another odd things because I < in my document for every < in my source not a replacement.
Some ligatures are handy indeed: -- -> endash --- -> emdash
I use them all the time. Even though the utf encoded values can work here, my editor (vim) using fixed width fonts, so it is easy to miss the difference between hypehn, endash, and emdash (in the markup). So, I would prefer them to be present.
Keep them, they are to usefull. I could also agree to Aditya's explanation.
' -> right single quote (I'm, isn't etc.)
I can automate the conversion of ' to the corresponding utf character inside vim, so this is not really essential. However, IMO this should not change.
Aditya
I nearly never need this in my documents but it is very usefull in I don't want to select the right character. This is also on of the points Word and Powerpoint users select the wrong character but TeX has always the right character :-) Wolfgang
Hi Mojca, On Dec 8, 2007, at 11:04 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
Hello,
just wondering: how many ConTeXt-ers depend on ligatures such as: '' (double quote) and '' (two single quotes) -> right double quote `` -> left double quote ,, -> DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
Handling different languages, so one needs a way to insert the ligs in the text. With UTF this is less of a problem
or even more weird ones: !` -> inverted exclam ?` -> inverted question << -> LEFT POINTING GUILLEMET (never heard of that ligature)
-> RIGHT POINTING GUILLEMET
For Spanish this is definitevely necessary. Again if coded in UTF there is no problem.
Some ligatures are handy indeed: -- -> endash --- -> emdash ' -> right single quote (I'm, isn't etc.)
Sure this is important, I suggest to add the horizontal ellipsis
I'm posting that question to get some feedback about which ones are expected to work/are fundamental for XeTeX & LuaTeX, so that others might be dropped from default additional font features (for third-party fonts). (I'm thinking about replacing tex-text in XeTeX with something: - more minimalistic - compatible with mkiv. Of course, users are still free to provide "tex-text" mapping explicitely as it's probably going to hang aound forever, together with XeTeX itself.)
Mojca
Willi
______________________________________________________________________ _____________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!
maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ______________________________________________________________________ _____________
BOEDE Book and Electronic Document Engineering Willi Egger w.egger@boede.nl KvK 17138708
On Dec 9, 2007 5:07 PM, Willi Egger wrote:
or even more weird ones: !` -> inverted exclam ?` -> inverted question
For Spanish this is definitevely necessary. Again if coded in UTF there is no problem.
Do Spansh users still key them in like that (apart from old TeX-ies who have never heard abot anything beyond \v, \", \')? I mean: would anyone miss those two ligatures? (I assume that people need to use inverted quotation marks in Word as well ...) Ono problem is that that's a "well known" TeX behaviour though (documented in beginner's manual as well).
Some ligatures are handy indeed: -- -> endash --- -> emdash ' -> right single quote (I'm, isn't etc.)
Sure this is important, I suggest to add the horizontal ellipsis
\dots? But what if one decides to use, say, 10 dots in a row? That might lead to weird effects (non-evenly spaced dots). -- and --- have been well established, so one would be careful enough before writing "----------". And there's \dots, so that one could have been mapped to ellipsis if needed. Thanks, Mojca
2007/12/9, Mojca Miklavec
On Dec 9, 2007 5:07 PM, Willi Egger wrote:
or even more weird ones: !` -> inverted exclam ?` -> inverted question
For Spanish this is definitevely necessary. Again if coded in UTF there is no problem.
Do Spansh users still key them in like that (apart from old TeX-ies who have never heard abot anything beyond \v, \", \')? I mean: would anyone miss those two ligatures? (I assume that people need to use inverted quotation marks in Word as well ...)
Ono problem is that that's a "well known" TeX behaviour though (documented in beginner's manual as well).
Some ligatures are handy indeed: -- -> endash --- -> emdash ' -> right single quote (I'm, isn't etc.)
Sure this is important, I suggest to add the horizontal ellipsis
\dots? But what if one decides to use, say, 10 dots in a row? That
\periods[10]
might lead to weird effects (non-evenly spaced dots). -- and --- have been well established, so one would be careful enough before writing "----------". And there's \dots, so that one could have been mapped to ellipsis if needed.
10 periods in the file should give 3 ellipsis and 1 single dot.
Thanks, Mojca
Wolfgang
Hi Mojca, On Dec 9, 2007, at 7:48 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
On Dec 9, 2007 5:07 PM, Willi Egger wrote:
or even more weird ones: !` -> inverted exclam ?` -> inverted question
For Spanish this is definitevely necessary. Again if coded in UTF there is no problem.
Do Spansh users still key them in like that (apart from old TeX-ies who have never heard abot anything beyond \v, \", \')? I mean: would anyone miss those two ligatures? (I assume that people need to use inverted quotation marks in Word as well ...)
I was not to the point on this and I misinterpreted your question. Sorry. Indeed the well known coding of umlauts and alike with \"... should be there for sake of compatibility. - If those would vanish, this would mean for me to re-encode a couple of thousand pages ... Coming back to the quotation-marks. IMHO one should stick to the \quote and \quotation constructs. This and only this allows you to change the appearance of the marks depending on a given language or adjust them to the style of a print-house/publisher. I would suggest not to make provisions in order to automatically convert ,, into „ . There will be consistency problems and the behaviour of Word i.e. that things happen while you have difficulty to control them.
Ono problem is that that's a "well known" TeX behaviour though (documented in beginner's manual as well).
Some ligatures are handy indeed: -- -> endash --- -> emdash ' -> right single quote (I'm, isn't etc.)
Sure this is important, I suggest to add the horizontal ellipsis
\dots? But what if one decides to use, say, 10 dots in a row? That might lead to weird effects (non-evenly spaced dots). -- and --- have been well established, so one would be careful enough before writing "----------". And there's \dots, so that one could have been mapped to ellipsis if needed.
The ellipsis is typographically an important 'character'. So todays solution with \dots or \unknown is fine to me. When necessary one can adjust the kerning of the dots for style-purposes. Otherwise one could discuss to convert three consecutive dots (and only those) to the horizontal ellipsis in Unicode, which would look always better than three dots from the keyboard. Also here it is questionable whether to have automatic conversion. Again this is resembling Word and how to keep grip on what is happening. IMHO the user who places an x-number of dots or dashes must know what he does. There might not be a generic solution for such cases. Willi
Thanks, Mojca ______________________________________________________________________ _____________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!
maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ______________________________________________________________________ _____________
Hello,
just wondering: how many ConTeXt-ers depend on ligatures such as: '' (double quote) and '' (two single quotes) -> right double quote `` -> left double quote ,, -> DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK (...)
You got replies from experienced users, so I thought you could use an answer from a begginer; there are many of us out there! Really, all of those are problems to me, even -- and ---. If you have ligatures at all, you have to take some (a lot) of time to learn how they work, and which ones are available, and how to avoid them when you need. I would really like if we could replace ligatures for a nice page, linked from the "first steps" documentation, explaining the most interesting Unicode characters and when to use them properly. I've just read about U+2010–2015 in wikipedia pages about hyphens and dashes, and I wish I were directed to those pages instead of everything I've read about ligatures so far. I'm not a professional user of Context, so of course you'll take that into account as you consider what I say. Best, Maurício
Maurício wrote:
Hello,
just wondering: how many ConTeXt-ers depend on ligatures such as: '' (double quote) and '' (two single quotes) -> right double quote `` -> left double quote ,, -> DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK (...)
You got replies from experienced users, so I thought you could use an answer from a begginer; there are many of us out there!
Really, all of those are problems to me, even -- and ---. If you have ligatures at all, you have to take some (a lot) of time to learn how they work, and which ones are available, and how to avoid them when you need.
I would really like if we could replace ligatures for a nice page, linked from the "first steps" documentation, explaining the most interesting Unicode characters and when to use them properly. I've just read about U+2010–2015 in wikipedia pages about hyphens and dashes, and I wish I were directed to those pages instead of everything I've read about ligatures so far.
I'm not a professional user of Context, so of course you'll take that into account as you consider what I say.
actually, what is called ligatures here, are no ligatures in the real sense; they are tricks that use the tex ligature mechanism to achieve something (the fi ligature came out of f + i written in sequence but nobody in the past ever wrore, by pen, three -'s separated by a small space in a row, it's was just a longer rule) by adding a hyphen+hyphen=endash and endash+hyphen=emdash rule in the (first) characters ligature table in the tfm file, one could save typing this solution is a very english-language oriented one, because in quite some languages --- happens less often than characters with accents or whateve; i wonder what would have happened if tex had initially been written for another language because if the tfm file could have dealt with > 256 characters "u -> uumlaut would have made sense as pseudo ligature too ... sometimes it's even hard to get rid of such pseudo ligs ... in documents coded in xml, --- really is --- and it' snear to impossible in traditional tex to selectively get rid of it ... so, apart from remapping the weird single quote and the en/emdashes (too many docs around) is no real reason for the other ones ... Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------
Hello,
just wondering: how many ConTeXt-ers depend on ligatures such as:
'' (double quote) and '' (two single quotes) -> right double quote `` -> left double quote ,, -> DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK (...)
You got replies from experienced users, so I thought you could use an answer from a begginer; there are many of us out there! (...)
actually, what is called ligatures here, are no ligatures in the real sense; they are tricks that use the tex ligature mechanism to achieve something (the fi ligature came out of f + i written in sequence but nobody in the past ever wrore, by pen, three -'s separated by a small space in a row, it's was just a longer rule) (...)
I see. I also read somewhere that some font mechanisms (OpenType?) also handle what is called ligatures by themselves, is that true? What about math mode? I've not used it that much, does it also have such kind of 'pseudo-ligatures'? I read that what I use in my keyboard to type minus (-) is actually just ascii minus/hyphen, but in Unicode there's an actual minus symbol (U+2212). Does that needs special handling? The ligature trick could not be used here, I imagine. Thanks, Maurício
On Dec 10, 2007 1:24 PM, Maurício wrote:
What about math mode? I've not used it that much, does it also have such kind of 'pseudo-ligatures'? I read that what I use in my keyboard to type minus (-) is actually just ascii minus/hyphen, but in Unicode there's an actual minus symbol (U+2212). Does that needs special handling?
Yes, and it has been taken care for that since the beginning of TeX existance (you don't need to worry about it). Another side of the truth is that there are no TeX math OpenType fonts yet (but they're on their way). Mojca
participants (7)
-
Aditya Mahajan -
Hans Hagen -
Henning Hraban Ramm -
Maurício -
Mojca Miklavec -
Willi Egger -
Wolfgang Schuster