there has been some discussion a while ago concerning utf8 support for LaTeX and as a result there has been some code development to provide utf8 support via inputenc. I would add something like that to the next latex2e release. this is kind of beta, but perhaps one or the other might want to give it a try. it can be found at http://www.latex-project.org/code/experimental/utf8ienc.zip there is also some inputenc support to allow inputenc chars being used in math (should be used with elatex) http://www.latex-project.org/code/experimental/inpmath.zip best frank