I absolutely agree! I have also written such a script (and library) some years ago in Perl. After adopting XeTeX I also wanted my input files to be more readable. It is available here: https://metacpan.org/release/LaTeX-Decode It supports the convertion of pretty much all accents, macros, diacritics and symbols you can imagine.
Regards, François Charette 2015-07-01 15:50 GMT+02:00 Robert Zydenbos <xe...@zydenbos.net>: > Please do not use the traditional TeX codes for the Indic diacritics > (things like \={a} etc.)! One of the big advantages of XeTeX is precisely > that it uses Unicode. This means that your input file can be typed using > any Unicode-supporting text editor (I use TeXShop on a Mac, TeXworks on > Linux). It is obviously much more efficient to write and read > "prajñāvādāṃśca bhāṣase" than "praj\~{n}\={a}v\={a}d\={a}\d{m}\'{s}ca > bh\={a}\d{s}ase". There are numerous good Unicode fonts, also such that are > freely available, that produce fine results, both onscreen and on paper. > > Because I had a number of files containing all those TeX codes and wanted > to switch to XeTeX, I wrote a simple program (or 'script', as some people > say) in Python (the older version 2.7, which is still the standard version > on many machines; but it can be rather quickly adapted for version 3, I > imagine) that takes a (La)TeX or ConTeXt input file with the TeX codes for > Indic diacritical marks and creates an output file with all those codes > turned into Unicode. (The one condition is that each letter with a > diacritical mark is placed between braces. "\={a}" etc. will be recognized, > but "\=a" will not, and therefore will remain unconverted.) > > Should anyone be interested in receiving a copy of the program, please > write to me off-list. > > Robert Zydenbos > > -- > Prof. Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos > Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie > Universität München > > On Jun 13, 2015, at 10:23 , hanne...@staff.uni-marburg.de wrote: > > > [...] > > > > The problem is that I need diacritics for Indian languages. In pdflatex > I use ucs for the > > utf-input, which is not perfect, but works with a few tweaks. Of course > there can be no serious > > problem in normal TeX, where you can in the worst case just type things > like \.n \d{t} and the > > like, which gives you the diacritics with any font (and mostly looks > quite good). > > > > In XeTeX a considerable number of otf-fonts does not yield the expected > result. In the ADF fonts, > > for instance, regardless whether you use ṅ or \.n, it does not work. > Usually the macron \=a works, > > but not the underdot ṭ (\d{t}) or the dot above the ṅ (\.n). [...] > > > > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex >
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