> But I don't know what are you going to do with the combining accent > appearing after the letter. Three possibilities occur to me. 1) make every character active and look ahead to see if it is being followed by a combining char. This is possible and fun to code in TeX but I don't really think it is a long term stable solution. 2) use perl (or anything else) to detect all combining characters and replace them by some command placed before the base. This is quick and easy to arrange, but if you are having a perl pre-pass before TeX, it may as well go further and decode the entire character stream into "latex internal form" ie 7bit ascii tex markup. In which case we may as well stay with that markup as latexs internal form. 3) use an underlying "tex" engine that understands unicode combining characters (and the unicode bidirectional algorithm) and other features of the unicode character properties. (and probably also xml document syntax as well) One day. David