Re: Inputting characters with specialist diacritic marks in emacs

[Haines Brown <haines@histomat.net>]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 05:30:00AM -0800, mikew2801@gmail.com wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am a linguist who works particularly with Indic languages. I am
> trying to do most of my work in emacs, but I am having problems using
> characters with diacritic marks (for instance ā, ī and so on) which
> are commonly used to transliterate old Indic languages such as
> Sanskrit and Pali.

Might not be helpful because I don't know if you prepare documents with
LaTeX. But when I put N\={a}g\={a}rjuna into a TeX document and process
it with pdfLaTeX, it shows up as Nāgārjuna.

For scripts such as Tamil அய்யா வணக்கம், I suspect you have to use XeLaTeX
rather than pdfLaTeX with a supporting font.

LaTeX-Indic is a Omega package that will enable the use of Indic
languages LaTeX documents without any preprocessing.

If you don't use LaTeX, you might do as I did for an array of even more
obscure characters. Rather than look up the Unicode each time, I have a
crib sheet with lists of caron, breve and macron and other characters
and simply yank/past from it as needed.

Another path is to use a Unicode editor such as Yudit, but I've no
experience with it.

Haines Brown