I think bringing UTF8 into the debate is an important idea (Karsten already remarked on the existence of some support for it). In this mail I like to explore the ideas a bit further on whether or not something like UTF8 or Unicode would be suitable, say, for LaTeX's internal character representation. I'm saying LaTeX's not TeX's, mind. TeX is 7bit with a parser that accepts 8bit but doesn't by default gives it any meaning. On the other hand Omega is 16bit (or more these days?) and could be viewed as internally using something like Unicode for representation. LaTeX might want to live on both or either of them. so its internal character representation has to be independent of the low-level representation in the formatter. As a recall: when i speak about LaTeX's internal character representation I mean the way LaTeX internally passes characters around (as long as i doesn't do typesetting). This representation is 7bit and consists of the visible ASCII (which is represented by itself, eg A as "A") and of anything else which is represented as, what is sometimes referred to as "font encoding specific commands". These are things like \"a or \textyen, etc (right now roughly 900+ are defined). These font encoding specific commands might look like TeX commands but with respect to the internal representation you better view them as abstract names for characters as they will get passed around unchanged, eg in marks or when written to files etc. Only when finally something is getting typeset they will get associated with font slot positions or with complicated maneuvers to position accents above or below other characters etc. you find the concepts and ideas behind this being described in a talk i gave in Brno which can be found at http://www.latex-project.org in the article section. ==================== Now for what Marcel wrote as a summary: > I am aware that some of these demands cannot really be met within > Knuthian TeX, but it seems LaTeX3 is prepared to eventually go beyond > TeX. So it may be useful to define a minimal set of required > extensions/changes, as this issue could be a major roadblock to > enlarging the developer base. For example, is there much motivation > for anybody to clean up the hyphenation mess before a clean long-term > solution (not just a work-around) is agreed on? The LaTeX internal character representation is a 7bit representation not an 8bit one as UTF8. As such it is far less likely to be mangled by incorrect conversion if files are exchanged between different platforms. I have yet to see that UTF8 text (without taking precaution and externally announcing that a file is in UTF8) is really properly handled by any OS platform. Is it? however, there is also the following question: wouldn't it be better if the internal LaTeX representation would be Unicode in one or the other flavor? in other words, instead of using \"a as the representation for umlaut-a use something like \unicode{00e4} or \uc00e4 % (as a command) or \utfviii{...} note that i deliberately had something start with a \ here. why is this needed? because you need to get back into control at various points and this is only possible if the whole construct can be viewed as a command as far as the underlying formatter is concerned. Using Omega this could probably handled differently but will have to perform reasonably on TeX as well so i don't see any other suitable way to present the internal form. Also with TeX visible ASCII is basically forced to be represented by itself which is another restriction. ========================================================= now what would be the advantages/disadvantages of the above approach? - clary the above approach will give a better naming scheme since unicode is an accepted standard and as such well-defined. - however, not clear is that the resulting names are easier to read, eg \unicode{00e4} viz \"a. - with intermediate forms like data written to files this could be a pain and people in Russia, for example, already have this problem when they see something like \cyr\CYRA\cyrn\cyrn\cyro\cyrt\cyra\cyrc\cyri\cyrya. In case of unicode as the internal representation this would be true for all languages (except English) while currently the Latin based ones are still basically okay. - the current latex internal representation is richer than unicode for good or worse, eg \" is defined individually as representation for accenting the next char, which means that anything \"<Bass-char-in-the-internal-reps> is automatically also a member of it, eg \"g. - the latter point could be considered bad since it allows to produce characters not in unicode but independently of what you feel about that the fact itself as consequences when defining mappings for font encodings. right now, one specifies the accents, ie \DeclareTextAccent\" and for those glyphs that exists as composites one also specifies the composite, eg \DeclareTextComposite{\"}{T1}{a}{...} With the unicode approach as the internal representation there would be an atomic form ie \unicode{00e4} describing umlaut-a so if that has no representation in a font, eg in OT1, then one would need to define for each combination the result. - anything else? i don't really think so and this mail is already getting rather long :-) so how does this all balance? i guess the first point is quite important and helpful since it also means that translating unicode based documents into the internal form gets rather trivial and the strange set of names within current LaTeX internal character representation (all of which are basically historical accidents and thus without much structure) is clearly far from optimal. But does it otherwise currently actually provides any advantage over the current situation? (other than better hiding that we couldn't deal with 99% of the unicode characters if they would appear in a document) in 1992/3 when we worked on shaping the ideas of the LaTeX internal representation we actually did discuss similar ideas but back then abandoned them because of resource constraints (in the software). Machines are nowadays bigger and faster so this isn't really much of an argument there. So... time for another attempt? comments? frank