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Date:         Mon, 1 Aug 2011 15:59:07 +0200
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From: Arno Trautmann <Arno.Trautmann@GMX.DE>
Subject: Re: future
To: LATEX-L@listserv.uni-heidelberg.de
In-Reply-To:  <82376E2C-57BF-42D3-B6E8-91FA98DABA45@frycomm.com>
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Status: R

Hi William,

William Adams wrote:
> On Aug 1, 2011, at 8:01 AM, William Adams wrote:
>
>> So I guess this has two questions:
>>
>> 1 - what is the optimal way to get non-standard characters like that into a text stream?

LuaTeX, I guess. The node manipulation in the post_linebreak_filter 
should easily do this and is most flexible.

> There's an obvious corollary to this:
>
> 1b - Do we have a list of characters which are replaced by vector elements? If so, what should be done about them?

In LuaTeX, traverse the node list, check for the char code, read out the 
width, replace the char node with a rule to the given width.

> I believe that in any instance of the user issuing a command to output character(s) matching character(s) need to show up in the output.

Depending on how many instances there are, this could lead to a huge 
number of output lines. I'd rather say, there should be a warning for 
each character at the beginning or at the end of the output. Maybe even 
the number of substitutet characters – which is no deal to do with a Lua 
approach.

cheers
Arno