141
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
m
added some texshow links
===Document Encoding===
XeTeX is able to handle UTF-8 or UTF-16 documents natively, without any interference or configuration from ConTeXt. If you do want ConTeXt to process UTF-8 characters specially, then you can activate it with <cmd>enableregime</cmd><tt>\enableregime[utf]</tt>. Be aware that you are then limited by the named glyphs that exist in the unicode vector files (<tt>unic-0xx</tt>). However, it is generally desirable to enter UTF documents without any regime notated, and let XeTeX work its magic.
You don't have to encode documents in UTF, though. ConTeXt allows you to use the regime of your choice because of its use of named glyphs, so documents in latin-1 or even MacRoman encoding can be supported, given the proper <ttcmd>\enableregime[]</ttcmd> command. For characters out of reach of the given regime, you can use accents (like <tt>\'e</tt>) and/or named glyphs (<tt>\eacute</tt>).
Although XeTeX would prefer that you key in documents in full Unicode, with things like '''—''' and '''“''' in the place of <tt>---</tt> and <tt>``</tt>, respectively. This is not always so feasible, so it provides a mechanism for inserting these "TeXish" ligatures. In a font specification, you need to insert <tt>mapping=tex-text</tt> as one of the font features. This is already done for all existing typescripts in <tt>type-xtx</tt>, but you should be aware of this concern if designing your own documents.
; Unicode symbol sets : While not exclusive to XeTeX, exactly, you get easy access to named Unicode symbols. XeTeX-specific commands switch to Apple-supplied default fonts for these symbols.
; Basic Bi-directional text : ConTeXt support for this was ushered in with XeTeX, but is fundamentally an eTeX feature. There is tentative support for direction changing with <tt>\pardir TRT</tt> and <tt>TLT</tt>, emulating Omega/Aleph's commands. These should be seen as low-level commands, to be intgrated with language switching, for example. There is a bad feature interaction between this and specials (e.g., color) support.
; Alternate script number conversions : Hans introduced some clever machinery into the conversion macros, allowing one to efficiently define a conversion vector (<ttcmd>\defineconversionvector</ttcmd>) for script-specific numbers. Arabic and Persian are provided.
; More Unicode : In the process of preparing XeTeX support in ConTeXt, many more Unicode glyphs were named and introduced into ConTeXt, including some Greek, Cyrillic, and Vietnamese.
; [[Fonts in XeTeX|Typescripts]] : There are a number of typescripts defined to get a XeTeX user started.
