Frank -- I don't know if you are aware of some private correspondence that I've had with others. But most who read this list were certainly not part of it. I think that switching the default font encoding to T1 is probably a good thing to do. I hope then that by default there are supported names like \textgreater \textasciitilde, etc. for all 33 non-alphanumeric printable ascii characters including 0x20 that work properly in various LaTeX contexts. My point of view is that of one writing a formatter from an XML document type to LaTeX source. Of course, David's Carlisle's xmltex, which I like as far as I've gone with it, can be used for this, but it's not the path I began in the summer of 1998, and I still see reason for formatting to LaTeX source in a system with modular design since then users (but not this user who just won't do that) have emergency recourse. In the general context of formatting from XML to LaTeX source, though not so much in my specific context, nor in the context of authors coming from a LaTeX or TeX background, I am concerned about what happens with 8 bit characters in the range 0xA0 - 0xFF from the various ISO 8 bit character sets. When such characters appear outside of markup in XML they have the same status as printable alphanumeric ascii characters. Presently one needs to fight the design of XML systems to accommodate them in formatting to LaTeX source for use with a default LaTeX installation. By default with T1, I believe, the input encoding for these characters matches the "cork" encoding. But when inputenc is set to something with a standard public name -- for example an 8 bit name that would be recognized by one of James Clark's XML parsers "xp" or "SP" I think it highly desirable that the typeset appearance of the characters match what *should* be the screen appearance in a web browser when the character set is properly specified. In particular under such an encoding absent an explicit author indication for math there should be no math. For example, the miniature "1/2" at data point 0xBD in ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) should *not* be regarded as math unless an author should choose for some reason I do not anticipate to place it inside math. (Probably, however, the present inputenc name "latin1" needs to remain as it is for backward compatibility.) I believe that David's xmltex accommodates all 16 bit characters under unicode, but it cannot be used in formatting to LaTeX source. -- Bill