David -- > Incidentally one reason why xmltex can not support utf16 is that > TeX buffers to ^J (or ^M) and throws away any bytes with value 32 that > occur at the end of this buffer, which might just be half of a 16bit > quantity that you'd rather keep. there's no way to control this UTF-8 has the virtue that looking at a single byte you know what kind of creature it is. I see this as a very desirable property for a universal encoding system. (Local coding systems are another matter.) So provide a front-end filter for converting UTF-16 to a better multibyte format. -- Bill