At 16:30 +0100 2001/02/11, Frank Mittelbach wrote: > 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{...} ... > - however, not clear is that the resulting names are easier to read, eg > \unicode{00e4} viz \"a. ... > - 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. ... >comments? There is this variation that one defines \u00e4 commands for Unicode compatibility. Then in some environment, one defines " as a letter, with \let\"a=\u00E4 etc., and in other environments \" is the usual control sequence. Thus, if one is in the environment where " is a letter, if some combination \x does not work, one will know that the Unicode version is not available, and one has to invoke another environment to handle that. Hans Aberg