On 10/01/19 10:03 AM, Kelly Smith wrote: > Hello, > > I know that text commands (as defined by \DeclareTextCommand) have > been important because of the various font encodings that arose over > LaTeX’s history, but it seems that the situation is quite different > for the XeTeX and LuaTeX engines. > > Given that both XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX accept UTF-8 input and use only > the TU font encoding, is it acceptable to forgo \DeclareTextCommand > for most—if not all—cases? > > For example, ® can simply be included directly in the document source, > so \textcopyright is not much more than an ASCII alias. That is what ConTeXt does. If you say \starttext \show\copyright \stoptext you'll see in the terminal > \copyright=macro: ->© However, for ConTeXt the whole consideration is a lot simpler because they only have to support a single engine and a single encoding (LuaTeX does not accept anything but UTF-8). > > As for less common symbols, one could simply wrap the text in a > document command. > > Excuse my naîveté, as there are probably important advantages to the > text command approach that I’ve completely overlooked. > > Warmly, > Kelly >