> Also, private use places are for interchange, not for internal > things. Internal things should use non-characters, I believe. Hmm a reasonable argument. Not sure I agree with it (just now) will think about that. > I can't see why it should limit additions, as long as old things work as > they worked. Exactly. Having spent around 12 years distributing TeX code, I am convinced that there is no change ever made to anything related to TeX that has not broken a package (and thus a few hundred or thousand documents) somewhere. The TeX macro model is so open, the full implementation of every macro is available to be inspected by any other macro, that changing anything (just adding a \relax) will break something. There is no sense in which you can re-implement something with the same behaviour as the original unless it is identical. > On Windows, both MiKTeX and fpTeX have it. both web2c aren't they? > We're asking distributions to > support Omega, we're not asking users to use some certain distributions. and Y&Y? and vtex and pctex and trutex (but trutex has omega I believe) (and on the Mac, textures? oztex?, and MVS mainfame?) some of the commercial systems have diverted greatly from the original Web source to offer things like dynamic memory allocation. probably they will move to a unicode based tex once sufficiently stable, but are you really ready to tell them to commit resources now? > We're talking about LaTeX3. The surgery will be needed for LaTeX3, isn't > it? well, true. But if we are talking about changes that break everything we shouldn't try to fool ourselves with statements that "old things will work". > The two versions need lots of development time, Yes (finding time for one version is hard enough). I don't think there is any chance of having a replacement for LaTeX that was not going to work with pdftex (or pdfomega) as without pdftex a large part of the existing users wouldn't move to a new system and many uses for xml typesetting would be lost. Having a tex system that produces pdf with type1 fonts is so much more comforting to people who want to have tex as a black box typesetter for xml systems. Unless a system works with all the major tex distributions (either because it uses standard TeX, or because the TeX distributions distribute omega or pdftex or etex) it will never replace LaTeX for many purposes. So I can't see any alternative but to have parallel development paths. I'd like to work on both (but find it hard to work on either at present) On the other hand the two versions don't have to be completely different. For example xmltex shows that utf8, cjk and the others show utf8 handling isn't impossible with TeX. Given that one would presumably still have the \' syntax, and also ready composed unicode characters in many cases, just saying that combining characters don't work if running over a standard TeX wouldn't be the end of the world. David _____________________________________________________________________ This message has been checked for all known viruses by Star Internet delivered through the MessageLabs Virus Control Centre. For further information visit http://www.star.net.uk/stats.asp