On 16/02/2010 14:57, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote: > My humble opinion is that LaTeX3 should define a character as being whatever the > underlying engine thinks is a character. That is, a "character" should be a > "character token" (with the catcode ignored or, equivalently, normalised): > - for pdfTeX, an 8-bit number > - for XeTeX, a 16-bit number > - for LuaTeX, a number in the range 0 -- 0x10ffff > > This way, the format does not need to hack extensively (as LaTeX2e does) around > the engine's limitations, and can let the engine do his job, and concentrate on > his own job as a macro package. (Sort of Unix philosophy: do one thing, do it well.) > > I mean, LaTeX2e *had to* hack around the encoding limitations of pdfTeX because > there was no alternative, but now there are. This was the point I was trying (and clearly failing) to get at: modern engines can deal with things so the formats don't need to. -- Joseph Wright