in response to > 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. and a french commentary on a russian text would... ? it's not as simple as you imagine (not least because the inputenc side of things is so complicated for russian). denis roegel brought this idea up in pr babel/3046, and there's a pretty clear response from johannes in the database (the response actually appeared this week, and _is_ in the database -- i've just checked). http://www.Uni-Mainz.DE/cgi-bin/ltxbugs2html?pr=babel/3046