Re: How to translate LaTeX into UTF-8 in Elisp?

[Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm>]

On Mon, Jul 03 2017, Marcin Borkowski wrote:
> On 2016-12-08, at 18:04, Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> 
> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I have a string with embedded sequences like "\'e" or "\H{o}". 
>> The
>> Emacs TeX input method knows how to convert them into "é" or 
>> "ő" (when
>> typing, of course).  Is there a way to use that to perform 
>> similar
>> conversions in a string?
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm revisiting this old thread now.  Since I got no satisfying 
> answers
> back then, here is my plan for solution.  I'm going first to map 
> \', \`
> etc. onto /names/ (this is a rather short list!), construct a 
> Unicode
> name of the character I want and then use =ucs-names=.
>
> For instance, \' maps to "ACUTE", then \'a will map to "LATIN 
> SMALL
> LETTER A ACUTE" and this can be fed into =char-from-name=.
>
> It is a horrible hack, but it should work.  Any better ideas?

Have you tried looking into the input method mechanism that 
translates "\'e" into "é"? The info on how do such translations is 
stored somewhere somehow, so it should in principle be possible to 
use it to do the translations you want. I don't know very much 
about quail (I define a few custom input methods in my init files, 
but that's about it), but it looks like the info is stored as an 
alist somewhere of the form ("\\'e" ?é).

Perhaps you've already explored this idea and found it too 
unwieldy, but you didn't mention it anywhere. 



-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments