apostoulos syropoulos writes: > Don't we need support for UCS-2 encoded files? And what about > Unicode surrogates (i.e., characters that consist of four octets)? the real rationale for adding support of ucs-8 to latex2e is its appearance as default encoding in at least one linux distribution. i don't believe there's justification for "main line" provision for all possible unicode encodings in latex: omega is designed for that sort of thing, and shows every sign of performing. it would be nice to do all of them in latex, but it's not the sort of thing tex is good at, in bulk (imho at least). i'm concerned about performance, about memory consumption, and so on. it would be nice to be proved wrong, but we're not there yet. robin