Comments on: Unicode to LaTeX

By: Visto nel Web – 67 | Ok, panico

Visto nel Web – 67 | Ok, panico — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 08:15:15 +0000

[...] Unicode to LaTeX ::: The Endeavour [...]

By: Canageek

Canageek — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 02:35:32 +0000

John: Semantic LaTeX is a big thing these days. It had a lot of features supporting that back in the day, before anything else did (emph instead of textitalic when appropriate). My code is often criticized as being too low level and not using enough semantic macros.

By: John

John — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:11:08 +0000

LaTeX was designed to put ink on paper. So if two concepts produce the same patterns pixels on paper, no need to distinguish them.

Unicode is meant to be more semantic, and so it makes a distinction between the capital ‘A’ of the English alphabet and the capital ‘A’ of the Greek alphabet. That distinction is useful in software. Maybe the software treats Greek text differently than English text. Maybe you want to search for a capital alpha in an English document containing countless English A’s.

Now LaTeX is being used to create online documents, usually PDFs. It would be nice if it made more semantic distinctions, but it wasn’t designed for that.

By: Ed Davies

Ed Davies — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:02:24 +0000

I have to say that I’m not convinced about this omega/ohm thing. Do we use a different “m” as the symbol for metres? Nope, so I don’t see why we need to be prejudiced against Greek letters, either.

By: Canageek

Canageek — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:40:04 +0000

Actually you are supposed to differentiate between ohm and omega, and there are a number of packages to do that, such as siunitsx. For example, if you use Omega for ohms it will wrong, as you will get an italic omega, instead of an upright omega.

By: John

John — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:15:19 +0000

Bart: Go ahead.

By: Bart

Bart — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 10:05:53 +0000

Hey, do you mind if I steal that data.js file? I'd like to start adding stuff like this to a unicode lookup tool of mine...

By: Ed Davies

Ed Davies — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 17:08:26 +0000

It could also usefully allow you to type (and, particularly, paste) the actual Unicode character as well.

By: John

John — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:37:06 +0000

Kyle: XeTeX and LuaTeX don’t run everywhere. Sometimes you need to use plain LaTeX.

Also, LaTeX commands are more memorable than Unicode code points. So when I’m writing LaTeX, I’d rather enter LaTeX commands than Unicode values.

By: Edgardo

Edgardo — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:03:17 +0000

This site lets you draw a symbol and returns the latex code for it:
http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

By: Kyle

Kyle — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:48:34 +0000

Can’t you just use XeTeX or LuaTeX? If you use a math enabled font, you should be able to get the same result, and your source will be more readable if you use a Unicode text editor.