14. TeX and LaTeX: How can i type and display Esperanto's accented characters?
Description
This article is from the Esperanto FAQ, by Mike Urban urban@netcom.com and Yves Bellefeuille yan@storm.ca with numerous contributions by others.
14. TeX and LaTeX: How can i type and display Esperanto's accented characters?
(Thanks to Edmund Grimley-Evans for this information.)
TeX and LaTeX are professional typesetting systems, available as free
software for most computers. Though they are not always easy to use,
they are extremely flexible; they are the standard tool for typesetting
scientific articles and are often used for complex typesetting in the
humanities.
With TeX or LaTeX any diacritic can be applied to any character, so it
is no harder to produce c-circumflex (\^c) than e-acute (\'e), say. A
large number of "style files" exist to facilitate the use of particular
languages; "esperant.sty" and "espo.sty", available at
ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex209/contrib/misc/
and elsewhere, both allow Esperanto's diacritics to be entered as
"^C ... ^u", and the same convention is used by the Babel package for
LaTeX2e which supports about 30 language, including Esperanto.
The programs produce "^j" by putting a circumflex onto a dotless j.
Although TeX's default Computer Modern font has a dotless j (\j), most
commercial fonts, including those that are built into laser printers, do
not. There is a work-around, available as "dotlessj.sty", that involves
blanking out the dot on an ordinary j; see
http://www.rano.demon.co.uk/dotlessj.html
Note that the Babel package does not include a hyphenation table for
Esperanto so it is usually best to discourage automatic hyphenation
(\hyphenpenalty=5000) and specify the hyphenation of particular words
where required (\hyphenation{Esp-er-anto}).
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