Bruno Le Floch wrote:
Is it simply a matter of going through the string and replace various
characters by TeX accents (and take care of character order), or does
the result have to be Unicode?
E.g., does it have to be a(a^ → ăâ, or can it be a(a^ → \u{a}\^{a} ?
If the second one is ok, then it shouldn't be too hard to write the
conversion in TeX macros. Please provide a list of the necessary
conversion rules.
Vietnamese is difficult for TeX, because over a single
character there can be a requirement for both an
accent (to indicate a pronunciation different from
that for the unaccented letter) and a tone marker
(which applies to the whole word, but which has
a canonical placement that may well be on an
already accented letter). Hàn Thế Thành created
a way of accomplishing this using standard TeX,
but XeTeX can do it natively. Incidentally,
the "ế" at the end of Thành's middle name demonstrates
exactly the problem : something that TeX cannot
accomplish without special fonts, since it has
no primitive for positioning two diacritics over
a single character.
Philip Taylor
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