On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 09:22:55PM +0100, Frank Mittelbach wrote:
> i nevertheless begin to wonder if we should change the default font
> encoding
> from OT1 to T1 so that more people get proper hyphenation without the
> need to
> say
>
>   \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
>
> in their documents and would be interested to hear what the opinion on
> this
> list would be (not that i consider this list a representative sample of
> the
> average LaTeX user).

Maybe another way to do it is to put it in babel. English writers don't
really need T1 fonts, and don't need a change in latex2e right now. But
any language in babel could have a default inputenc and fontenc, such
that setting

        \usepackage[francais]{babel}

or (german, or any west europe language) would automatically set the T1
fontenc and the latin1 inputenc. Setting

        \usepackage[russian]{babel}

would select a different and suitable (inputenc,fontenc) tupple.

--
        Éric Brunet