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Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
From: David Carlisle <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 17:13:04 GMT
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Parts/Attachments: text/plain (30 lines)
> But isn't \'e an abbreviation for \acute{e},
No.

No on two levels, firstly \' doesn't expand to any (document usable)
command form, it is essentially, but more importantly the latex internal
form should be thought of as a symbolic name consisting of those
characters. \'e (actually the internal form isn't quite that because of
the annoying tabbing restrictions, but ignore that for now).

\'e is a three letter name for taht character, like e-acute or
U+E9 or &#xe9;

Sometimes latex passes it round as a string of three tokens, and
sometimes the \' is tokenised but again this is an implementation
detail. Conceptually it is just latex's cannonical name for an e acute.

> I see \'e and \uE9 as formally different things,

That isn't the latex way. If you use a latin 1 input encoding and enter
a é (which was an e acute if this mail path isn't 8bit safe)
then latex will convert that to \é internally before converting that
back to the same byte as it started with if typesetting in T1 encoding.

This in fact is similar to a unicode combining character if you do e'
where 'is teh combining acute it is (to a unicode/xml system)
supposed to be the same as if you'd entered the e acute character
(but don't try it in xmltex)

David

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