At 21.32 +0200 2001-05-13, Hans Aberg wrote: >At 15:18 +0200 2001/05/13, Lars Hellström wrote: >>Well, the \InputTranslation and \OutputTranslation primitives of Omega >>already provide that functionality, so there is no need to deal with >>variable-sized characters in the TeX programming. The problem is that one >>might want to employ additional sets of translations (which would then act >>on streams of equally-sized characters) between those extremes of the >>program, but Omega doesn't provide for this. > >I am not sure what you mean here: UTF-8 is variable sized. > >I suggested that for every file not using a 32-bit character type, one has >an additional file (in ASCII) identified by some kind of file name ending >with information about the encoding. (For example, if the file "<name>" is >not 32-bit, is there si also an ASCII file named "<name>.encoding".) > >This way, one can provide as many IO code converters as one bothers to >write, without the extended TeX ever knows anything about it. (If Omega >uses C++ for IO, one can use something called a codecvt. Or use pipes, >where available.) Read Sections 8--12 (Section 12 in particular) of the Omega draft documentation---that will answer you question more thoroughly that I bother to do right now. Marcel's summary contains a reference to it. But in short the equivalent functionality is already implemented (without resorting to language or platform specific mechanisms such as those you mention). Lars Hellström