[tex-live] packages with characters > 127

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Wed, 30 Dec 2009 23:43:51 GMT schrieb Karl Berry:

>     I've detected and sorted the packages in TeX Live 2009 that contain 
>     8-bit characters > 127 (and thus cannot be used directly by LuaTeX nor 
>     XeTeX
> 
> Elie, I know you're just trying to improve things here, but something
> seems fundamentally wrong to me with having to change long-existing and
> long-working style files for the sake of these new engines.  The world
> is not ever going to switch to all Unicode, and certainly has not done
> so right now.  So I find this new "requirement" to be working against
> ourselves.  The TeX world as a whole should be encoding agnostic IMHO,
> not try to force everyone into one mold.
> 
> Is there no way to make the engines more forgiving?

I don't think that there is actually a major problem here. xelatex
is now used for some time without a lot of complains about
incompatible style encodings (actually I don't remember ever have
seen such a complain). The majority of styles are using non-ASCCI
chars only in comments and the engines (at least xetex is) are
already forgiving in this case.

Probably it will be more the other way round: People who use foreign
scripts are already writing styles which defines commands with names
in their native script. This styles can only be used with the
unicode engines.

For the old packages there will be more problems concerning the
documentations. It will not help to convert an euro € to ^^80 as in
unicode the euro is on U+20AC so the correct translation for xetex
is ^^^^20ac -- and this will not work either if standard latex
encoded fonts are used. Also the preamble of documents had to be
changed for the other engines.


-- 
Ulrike Fischer