Re: question about encoding (spanish document)

[mxp]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

>> I'm trying to write a document in spanish, but I can't get the right
>> encoding to produce the written accent mark.
>> What's the encoding I have to use (in vim) to produce the correct glyph?
> 
> You can use Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) and you don't need to do anything
> special to tell Lout about that: this is the default.  In Vim, I think
> you have to tell it something like `:set encoding=latin-1'.

If you prefer storing your documents in UTF-8, you could use iconv to
convert them on the fly for Lout, e.g.,

  $ iconv -f utf-8 -t iso-8859-1 document.lt | lout > document.ps

Of course you still can't use characters outside of Latin 1.

>> What about UTF-8 support?...
> 
> Some time ago, Michael Piotrowski and I reached the conclusion that
> adding UTF-8 support should be "feasible in bounded time", but we
> haven't got any further so far.  ;-)

True :-)

Reading UTF-8 encoded files and processing the *characters* shouldn't
be too hard, and there are libraries which could be used.

The problems start when you want to produce output, i.e., when mapping
characters to glyphs.  Since you'd want to be able to use a reasonable
subset of Unicode (say, Lating, Greek, Cyrillic, and various symbols),
this would require transparently combining glyphs from several fonts.
Lout currently doesn't do this, so you'd have to do a lot of work in
this area and find solutions which also fit in with the rest of Lout.

Greetings

-- 
Michael Piotrowski, M.A.                               <address@hidden>
Public key at <http://www.dynalabs.de/mxp/pubkey.txt>