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From: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Upper/lowercasing national character---need help!
Keywords: national characters
Message-ID: <7791@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: 10 Jul 90 05:49:44 GMT
Sender: news@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
Reply-To: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu
Distribution: comp
Organization: Harvey Mudd College
Lines: 31

In article <963@barsoom.nhh.no>, tih@barsoom.nhh.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) writes...
>We're having a problem here with the Norwegian national characters and
>TeX...  For our 3 special characters, we use \AE, \O and \AA for upper
>and \ae, \o and \aa for lower case.  This is standard TeX.  However,
>the command \uppercase{\ae\o\aa} produces the equivalent of \ae\o\AA,
>while \lowercase{\AE\O\AA} produces the same as \AE\O\aa.  We need to
>somehow tell TeX that the first two pairs have their other-case
>counterparts as well, and I've been unable to correctly modify their
>\uccode and \lccode versions.  (I've successfully changed the \uccode
>and \lccode values for normal letters, but TeX doesn't seem to react
>to my attempts to change these...)

In general, I recommend that for most applications, people *not*
use \uppercase directly. The problem is that The expansion of \AE
and \O occurs too late for \uppercase to have done anything about
it. My solution to this problem is as follows:

\def\toupper#1{{\let\ae=\AE \let\oe=\OE \let\o=\O
    \let\aa=\AA \let\l=\L \def\ss{SS}%
    \expandafter\uppercase\expandafter{#1}}}

8-bit pre-accented characters can be handled using appropriate
\uccode definitions.

-dh

---
Don Hosek                         TeX, LaTeX, and Metafont Consulting and
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