[Aleph] ON-topic: unicode editors (was: OTP and verbatim)

[Idris Samawi Hamid]

Hi François,

This is really as on-topic as can be, because aleph will certainly need a good 
unicode editor eventually...

For Arabic and bidi, nothing beats SC Unipad. The work they have put into 
those 2 issues is nothing short of amazing, and I no longer use roman 
transcription thanx to its features (especially accent handling). 
Unfortunately it is expensive ($199.00), though it is quite usable without 
registration (it will stop editing long files after a minutes of startup). And 
yes, it does not provide much that we need for TeX (shell, syntax 
highlighting, etc). (As for yudit, it's really not very attractive and is no 
match for UniPad at all). I gave up on Emacs a long time ago as far as Arabic 
is concerned. And jEdit really is no good for Arabic-script. Right now, Unipad 
is the only serious contender.

I hope that one of the open source editors (or even WinEdT (world's greatest 
TeX shell)) takes a cue from Unipad and implements its features.

Adam and friends are doing excellent work with XeTeX, though aleph has a much 
better bidi as far as I can tell. What we eventually need is an integration of 
aleph (or its features) into pdfeTeX. The resulting beast;-) will make an 
excellent successor to TeX for all of us. Then, e.g., XeTeX will be able to 
support packages made with aleph. Oops, I'm dreaming again...

Thnx for this contribution
Idris

>===== Original Message From Firmicus at ankabut.net =====
>Many many weeks ago, Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
>
>>
>> Eventually I want to c a TeX-friendly Unicode editor so I can dispense
>> with transcriptions for the most part...
>>
> [NB: This is somewhat off-topic but I thought some readers of this list
>might appreciate.]
>
>Nowadays I seldom use transcriptions, except when entering individual,
>rarely-used characters or symbols.
>
>May I suggest some open-source TeX-friendly Unicode editors that work on
>multiple platforms?

============================
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523