some shorter answers to Javier's mail: > [Marcel:] > > > Anyway, Frank, I just got your last mail in my inbox (need to read the > > > details more carefully), and I think we agree that it's worth > > > exploring if there would be a substantial advantage for having some > > > engine with Unicode internal reprentation. > > [Frank:] > > it surely is, though i'm not convinced that the time has come, given that the > > current LICR actually is as powerful (or more powerful in fact) than unicode > > ever can be. > > Please, could you explain why? I mean that the LICR is (conceptually) a superset of unicode; it can encode any unicode character but also can encode characters not in unicode. Clearly you can do that in Omega as well, but my point is that the LICR is invariant to certain operations, eg writing to files and reading back in. > PS. I would also apologize for discussing a set of macros which > has not been made public yet, but remember it's only a i see no grounds for the need to apologize here since you are discussing the basic concepts of LaTeX and or how you think they could or need to bedeveloped further (to, say, be usable with Omega) > draft and many thing are liable to change (and maybe > the final code can be quite different. As we Spaniards say, if we would only discuss final code, that is not going to change, what should we discuss, any why should we discuss it? actually a large part your implementation should rather be discussed on this list rather than on the omega developers list since it concerns derivation or extensions to LaTeX's user interface --- that is if you (plural, ie the omega developers) want to keep LaTeX compatible with a LaTeX variant on Omega so i would really appreciate a discussion concerning its features and proposed document interfaces on this list. clearly the actual implementation or details very specific to Omega might not be that interesting, but how you model language in the source and what kind of designer/user modifications are possible etc are very interesting in general. I can only repeat what i wrote to the developer list: if we go separate pathes now and produce incompatible versions so that documents from LaTeXonTeX can't be processed on LaTeXonOmega and vice versa[1] then this is hurting everybody but mostly will have the danger of leaving Omega behind since the majority of package that need to hook into language features will hook into those provided by LaTeXonTeX since that has the bigger basis. ------- [1] that direction is of course only possible if one doesn't use features of omega not available in TeX but for many languages and documents it should and would be possible to run on both systems (even if the output is slightly different). frank