Re: Documentation (was Re: [OS X TeX] Kanbun (漢文) and French...)

[Alain Schremmer]

On Jan 4, 2009, at 11:31 AM, Herbert Schulz wrote:

>
> On Jan 4, 2009, at 9:42 AM, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
>
>> On lundi 05 janv. 09, at 00:25, cfrees at imapmail.org wrote:
>>
>>> Well, TNR is obviously not an option since it is not free.
>>
>> I only mentioned TNR because it was the font discussed in the  
>> quote I used.
>>
>>> The default must be guaranteed to be available on all the  
>>> platforms TeX runs on.
>>
>> No. It certainly must not. There are software ways to test which  
>> platform the application is running on to allow for settings  
>> specific to that platform. Which means you could have a Windows  
>> default font, a Mac default font and if the platform is not  
>> recognized for whatever reason, use the application embedded  
>> default font.
>>
>>> The default choices have to work in a huge variety of situations.
>>
>> Indeed. And that is not the case with Computer Modern. Computer  
>> Modern works for exactly 2 languages in the world. English, and a  
>> minority language that uses exactly the same characters. _That_ is  
>> very far from a "huge variety of situations".
>>
>>> These are not _MacTeX_ choices at all.
>>
>> Then what is the point of MacTex at all ? If MacTex is made for  
>> the OSX, then I can't see how changing the TeX default font to use  
>> a font provided by default by the OS is a problem ?
>>
>>
>>
>> Jean-Christophe Helary
>
>
> Howdy,
>
> Using LaTeX I can simply save the file as UTF-8 (so that the  
> accented characters are retained as such) and tell TeX that the  
> file is encoded in UTF-8. So
>
> %%!TEX TS-program = pdflatex
> %%!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode
> \documentclass{article}
> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % use this when using (pdf)latex
> \begin{document}
> This an è and an é!
> \end{document}
>
> works and is very simple. Unfortunately once you use characters  
> outside the ASCII set there are multiple, incompatible  
> representations so the second line is to tell TeXShop that the file  
> should be saved and opened with UTF-8 encoding so the characters  
> are displayed correctly; for other Editors use whatever they need  
> for this. The fourth line tells LaTeX (pdflatex in this case) that  
> UTF-8 is being used to encode the extensions from ASCII.
>
> For XeLaTeX I'd use
>
> %%!TEX TS-program = xelatex
> %%!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode
> \documentclass{article}
> \usepackage{xltxtra} % use this when using xelatex
> \begin{document}
> This an è and an é!
> \end{document}
>
> to accomplish the same thing. By default the xltxtra package uses  
> the fontspec package which uses Latin Modern as the default font  
> (supplied with MacTeX/TeX Live) and will display the accented  
> characters correctly even without defining a font to use.
>
> In either case one extra line must be used to let the processor  
> know that extensions to ASCII are being used.

In any case, this is way beyond me which would seem to support  
Helary's point. (And I am not using "seem" the way Rees is.)

Baffled regards
--schremmer