As François Charette states on page 4 of his ««ArabXeTeX Manual»» there is
a great advantage to being able to input a language via code rather than
typing the glyph. This is particularly true if the language is not one
that you master. As a personal example I cite Cree $\^{1}$. It is far
easier, and much faster, for a non-speaker to type in \mi than trying to
search through the syllabic table for the sign for "mi" and then
figuring out which key to touch (provided that you can input from the
keyboard, which is not always the case)..
This also has a great advantage in the teaching or linquistic description
of a language, especially since the same coding can be used to print a
transliteration; see e.g., Daniels and Bright, ««The World's Writing
Systems»», Oxford University Press, 1996 for the usefulness of such a
capability.
This brings up the question of UNICODE.In order to write:
\def\mi{^^^^14a5}
one has to search through the UNICODE table to find the ̈mi ̈
syllabic. The
tables tend to be all inclusive and thus very large and difficult to search
through.
Then there is the questsion of particular fonts. Does the font contain ALL
syllabics? just Cree syllabics? just Moose Cree?$\^{1}$ Does the font even
follow UNICODE (not always evident)?
In view of the above a VERY useful tool would be the equivalent of
[testfont.tex]/[fonttable.tex], which, for a given UNICODE-based font,
would print the glyph and the corresponding UNICODE number.
My attempts at using the latter (in PureTeX) with Cree resulted in a Cork
type table. Is there such an tool or modification of [fontable.tex]?
Roger Herz-Fischler
1. See http://www.languagegeek.com/font/fontdownload.html .
--------------------------------------------------
Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
