[tex-live] packages with characters > 127

[Zdenek Wagner]

Imagine that someone would write something in French using UTF-8 and
load a .sty file with ISO-8859-15 encoded characters in it. It won't
work. If the characters were entered as TeX sequences, it would work
in any case.

2009/12/31 Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard <mpg at elzevir.fr>:
> Karl Berry a écrit :
>>     It is done (not the TL09 version, though). The point is, packages using
>>     non-ascii characters currently don't take that kind of precautions.
>>
>> The point for me is that it shouldn't be up to each individual package
>> author.  It should be done at the engine level.
>>
> If it were doable, I would perhaps agree, but I hardly see a way. (Except
> creating a "bytes mode" in XeTeX/LuaTeX and making it the default, which would
> IMO be a greater evil that the small problems we're facing now.)
>
>> The point for me is that the reality is that authors don't stick to
>> plain ASCII and there is no real reason they should.  If a French author
>> wants to use 8859-15, that should be ok.  We should be liberal in what
>> we accept.
>>
> Already with current latex/pdftex, they can't without restrictions. The
> restrictions will only be slightly higher with LuaTeX/XeTeX.
>
> (If "we" is understood as "TL/ctan2tds", then I agree that we should be liberal
> and treat everything as bytes in an encoding-agnostic way and without altering it.)
>
>> The point for me is that, again, with such a basic thing as character
>> encoding, there should be no issue of "compatibility" at all.  Authors
>> have preferred character sets.  We (implementors) should deal with that,
>> not to try ram the One True Way down everyone's throats.
>>
> I don't see asking people to declare the encoding they use (or at least whether
> bytes mode or some-variant-of-unicode mode is to be used) as an unacceptable
> pressure on authors.
>
>> Like line endings ...
>
> Line endings are technically easier :-)
>
> Manuel.
>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz