Yan-nhaŋu glottals and LaTeX

This post will probably be of interest only to the (rather small number of) people who use LaTeX to typeset Yolŋu Matha. Yolŋu Matha uses a symbol for the glottal stop which is basically an apostrophe ‘ without smart quotes turned on (it dates from the days before smart quotes). These days there is a small movement amongst Yolŋu typesetters to distinguish quotation marks from the glottal. This turns out to be surprisingly hard to do in LaTeX. Prime symbols won’t work, the verbatim environment doesn’t work, the IPA primary stress mark doesn’t work. What does look ok, however, is the tipa vertical bar accent with some space fudging.

{\textipa{\hspace{-1.5pt}\textvbaraccent{}\hspace{-1.5pt}}}

to be precise.

XeLaTeX and XeTeX

I’ve got XeLaTeX and unicode LaTeXing working on my laptop (PC, XP/SP2). Here’s what I did:

I’m using WinShell as the editor. (Normally I use WinEdt, which I like better, but winedt isn’t unicode compliant, thus defeating the purpose of trying out XeLaTeX.)

I’m using MikTeX as the compiler. It has XeLaTeX and XeTeX bundled with it.

I had to define a user process to call ‘xelatex’ (although you could just change the LaTeX button too, probably).

I then tested the setup with some of Daniel Stender’s Devanagari examples. That downloaded the necessary additional packages and did the font setup.

And Robert’s your mother’s brother! Yan-nhaŋu without \uld for ḏ, etc!

Updated because as William pointed out, I did mean WinEdt and not Winedit (the link was right).

Xe(La)Tex for Windows

A new version of the XeTex/XeLaTeX portal for Windows has been released. Various people have had trouble with the old version – maybe this helps.

CiteULike

Probably everyone’s known about this for ages, but here at Anggarrgoon we specialise in being on the cutting edge of technology, even if it’s the edge used for bashing breadcrumbs…

If not, click on the CiteULike link in the sidebar on the right, under the blogroll. You’ll be taken to “anggarrgoon’s library”. It’s a site where you can tag articles and web sites, and export the citations in various formats, including (joy of joys!) BibTeX. Very cool when you’re compiling a list of online resources, which is how I found it. I’ve set the sidebar widget to display the three most recent additions.