On Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:46:21 -0600, Mojca Miklavec
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد
> wrote:
>>
>> I would like to be able to do things like
>>
>> Mohamed -> Muḥammad
>>
>> which would save me a lot of time in proofreading, editing, etc.
>
> It's easy to write a simple ruby/perl(or even lua) script that will do
> such changes for you *before* typesetting articles. That's probably
> much better, since you also want to have clean sources at some point.
Yes, but the above is just one kind of example. Indeed, what I am thinking
of is just an extension of the kind of configurability texies like to do.
For your average user -- or a secretary -- we don't want to have to point
them to lua or ruby etc...
> Of course, writing the list of substitutions still needs to be done by
> you, but that's in either case.
>
> If you need that, write kind-of-specification how you would like to
> use such a command.
Maybe I misunderstand... I could see something like I mentioned in the
original mail
\definesubstitution{<string1>}{<string2>}
or even a database approach:
\definesubstitutions[
<string1>,<string1'>|
<string2>,<string2'>|
<string3>,<string3'>
]
Here is another example. I generally prefer an en-dash padded with spaces
-- and with a no-break space after -- to an em-dash for parenthetical
constructions. So I would like to do, eg
\definesubstitution{<emdash>}{ <endash>~}
Again, this saves time in extensive editing, and I can stay in TeX without
fiddling so much with scripting, CTRL-F/H/R etc. It maintains control in
case I change my mind and want to revert etc. For long documents and
projects this gets unwieldy pretty fast and I end up with lots of typos
etc.
I guess we could get really funky and add a regular expressions engine
using lua:
\definesubstitution[regex]{<string1>}{<string2>}
And I'm sure Hans, Taco, and other programmers can think of other nifty
macros...
But the basic functionality would suffice for now :-)
Best wishes
Idris
--
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid, Editor-in-Chief
International Journal of Shi`i Studies
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
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