Sorry, I have not followed this discussion carefully on what others said
but if all fails, I would use an external program (a per-processor) to do
that. You can actually can make it automatic by just using the write18
feature of TeX. You write your tex document in VQR, then TeX calls your
per-processor and converts your VQR to unicode and finally compiles your
unicode TeX document, giving you PDF.
On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Bruno Le Floch <blfla...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Thanks for the explanation. So we need to produce a Unicode string.
>
> Firstly, I should have asked: is it possible to require the Vietnamese
> VIQR input as an argument of a macro, rather than being typeset
> directly? e.g., \viqr{a^o' e\.}. I'll assume that it is ok.
>
> Then do you have a list of all Vietnamese characters and their VIQR
> representation? Or some precise reference to what transformation you
> want to apply? In particular, how many different characters do you
> expect to get on output (that should be the size of the "alphabet")?
>
> Regards,
> Bruno
>
>
>
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