Joseph Wright <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > 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. i read manuel as saying that latex 3 need _only_ deal with the "natural" data type of the engine, so that the fantasies involved in reading utf-8 in latex 2e need not be duplicated for latex 3. nice idea, imho. r