David Carlisle wrote --
> But whether the internal
> canonical form is a unicode number or a latex style 7bit string \'e
> the issues of mapping between input encodings and this internal form,
> and from there to font encodings, are probably about the same.
And I just want to agree with this.
In fact I would go a lot further and say that the problems raised in
this discussion such as the following are the same whatever
system you use to do quality typesetting:
what is a character?
what is the relationship between character strings and relatively positioned
glyphs on a surface?
Thus LaTeX and its choice of internally using 7-bit strings is a also
a mere detail.
And these problems do not go away just because you use larger integers
to represent text streams.
chris