Hi all, Sorry for this late answer. > it seems to me that this all boils down to "i want to ensure that all is > Type1" so that i get proper pdf files. or am i wrong? That could be a possible reason, but very likely some people could find other reasons. But yes, that is what I was thinking about. More generally, the automatic selection should be done taking into account possible restrictions/features defined by the user. (Which restrictions/features can be set is to be studied.) It should be noted, however, that text also contains symbols and that usually we are using _two_ encodings -- if we say \defaultencoding{T1}, \textdagger is taken from cmsy, which is the default symbol font (OMS). So we have another problem when selecting an encoding -- in fact we must select two. Instead of multilingual documents, I would rather speak of multiscript documents, since imo this concept is more important. Of course, different languages use the latin script in different ways, but when there are languages using diffent scripts there are additional problems. For example, in a text containing both latin and cyrillic scripts the following line of code might not make sense: \usepackage{times} \usepackage{textcomp} Is times applied to both scripts? What happens if for some reason I like cyrillic times and latin palatino? Which symbol fonts are used? And if there is no times font for cyrillic? Or there is no symbol font? If you use latin with tibetan, things are more complicated because tibetan doesn't understand what a times font is, and again, what happens if a certain script requires two or more metrics and/or encodings? Finally, it remains the problem of what happens if people dislike the default settings. But that is unavoidable... Javier ___________________________________________________________ Javier Bezos | TeX y tipografia jbezos at wanadoo dot es | http://perso.wanadoo.es/jbezos/ ........................................................... CervanTeX http://apolo.us.es/CervanTeX/CervanTeX.html