The Yodl language provides a way to define character translation tables, to activate them, and to deactivate them. A character translation table defines how a character in the input will appear in the output. There are two main reasons for the need of character translation tables. First, a document language becomes much easier to use when you can type an asterisk as * instead of $*$ or \verb/*/ (these are sequences from the LaTeX document language). Hence, a mechanism that expands a * in the input to to \verb/*/ on the output, saves the users a lot of typing. Second, forcing users to type weird sequences won't work if you're planning on converting the same Yodl document to a different output format. If the user types \verb/*/ in the input to typeset an asterisk in the output, how should he or she arrive at a single * in the output in another output format? The solution is of course to define the translation for an input character like * given the output format.
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Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 1999 Karel Kubat and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

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