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Date:         Thu, 10 Jan 2019 15:37:32 +1300
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From:         Henri Menke <henrimenke@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: Text Commands in XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX
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On 10/01/19 10:03 AM, Kelly Smith wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I know that text commands (as defined by \DeclareTextCommand) have
> been important because of the various font encodings that arose over
> LaTeX’s history, but it seems that the situation is quite different
> for the XeTeX and LuaTeX engines.
> 
> Given that both XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX accept UTF-8 input and use only
> the TU font encoding, is it acceptable to forgo \DeclareTextCommand
> for most—if not all—cases?
> 
> For example, ® can simply be included directly in the document source,
> so \textcopyright is not much more than an ASCII alias.

That is what ConTeXt does.  If you say

\starttext
\show\copyright
\stoptext

you'll see in the terminal

> \copyright=macro:
->©

However, for ConTeXt the whole consideration is a lot simpler because
they only have to support a single engine and a single encoding (LuaTeX
does not accept anything but UTF-8).

> 
> As for less common symbols, one could simply wrap the text in a
> document command.
> 
> Excuse my naîveté, as there are probably important advantages to the
> text command approach that I’ve completely overlooked.
> 
> Warmly,
> Kelly
>