David,

> Saveboxes in the preamble are probably not a good idea, anyway, since
> the font setup has not completed there.

Maybe, but saveboxes and definitions are alike and
they are actually used in preambles and style files. My
experience as maintainer of the Spanish style for babel
is that people put saveboxes in the preamble, and that if
they don't work, people think it's a bug. Note saveboxes
work with latin1, applemac, cp1252, etc. -- if
utf8 produces an error it could be confusing and I'm
pretty sure there will be lots of bug reports.

Javier
_____________________________________________________________________
Javier Bezos                     |  TeX y tipografia
jbezos arroba wanadoo punto es   |  http://perso.wanadoo.es/jbezos/
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Composición de textos técnico-científicos y con escrituras no latinas
Consultoría y desarrollo de soluciones para TeX, LaTeX y Omega