On Mon, Nov 15, 1999 at 10:07:35PM +0100, Marcin Wolinski wrote: > Denis B. Roegel wrote: > > French should have < latin1, T1 >, Russian could have < koi8-r, X2 >, etc. > > These encodings would then just be triggered when one writes > > \selectlanguage{french}, etc. I haven't tried the new version of babel, > > Unfortunatelly many input encodings can be appropriate for a given > language (e.g. for Polish we have at least 3 widely used encodings), > and it may be difficult to judge, which of them should be default > (this may depend on the operating system). So it probably is not such > a good idea to have global defaults. Why not ? There is no way it can hurt. If there are three encoding for polish, then one third of the users will be happy that a default exists, and nothing will change for two thirds of the users nor in good, nor in bad. On the other hand I can understand that you don't want to choose the default encoding and get insults by e-mail from 2/3 of the Poles, but if this choice is done, it's for everybody's benefit. In all case there is absolutely no reason to not establish a default for languages where the (input|font)encoding is evident. I am giving every year practical introducting lessons to LaTeX2e to french students with no computer background, and I always have a bad time to justify why every document must contain \usepackage[babel]{francais} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} The goal of these practical lessons is to show an alternative to ms-word to humanities student who will have to write down thesis, and you can bet these kinds of details don't help. Éric Brunet