Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!educ-isis!teexdwu
From: teexdwu@ioe.lon.ac.uk (DOMINIK WUJASTYK)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: No accented characters
Summary: Yes, TeX *is* perfect
Message-ID: <1990Oct11.110320.12998@ioe.lon.ac.uk>
Date: 11 Oct 90 11:03:20 GMT
References: <1048100005@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: teexdwu@ioe.lon.ac.uk (DOMINIK WUJASTYK)
Organization: Institute of Education University of London
Lines: 31

In article <1048100005@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu writes:

>One of the reasons I like TeX is that it allows me to typeset text in the
>Esperanto language as well as many others.  The approach of treating these
>letters as accented letters made it possible (albeit not perfect) to have
>these letters without someone having to create the fonts for them AND TO
>MAKE SURE IT IS DONE FOR ALL LANGUAGES.

This is a very important point indeed, and must not be overlooked by
those people struggling with the character set problem.  Any character
set, even one with pre-composed accents for Swedish or whatever, really
should have the separate accents too, for use with \accent, so that
unusual words can be dealt with.  And unusual words are very usual.
I too came to TeX partly because it could typeset all the Indic 
words I use that have macrons over the vowels and underdots under
many consonants, s-acute, and so on.
 
>Of course it is not yet even close to perfect.  Cyrillic is missing.  And
>languages like Arabic, Japanese, Hindu, Georgian, etc., cannot yet be
>typeset. 

TeX is more perfect than you think.  I would guess that you are not a
member of the TeX Users Group, or you would know from the excellent
journal TUGboat that all the above languages and scripts can be typeset
by TeX already.  (If by "Hindu" you mean "Devanagari", and by
"Georgian" you mean "extended Cyrillic".)

Phil makes an extremely important point.  Text fonts that omit floating 
accents will not be widely adopted, mark my words.

Dominik