>>>>> On Tue, 16 Nov 1999 10:26:42 +0100, "Denis B. Roegel" <[log in to unmask]> said: > Among the language attributes, there should IMHO be "default encodings." > These encodings would be either a pair of < input encoding, output encoding > > or a pair of lists of encoding, which would enable priorities. > For instance, English should have as a default < ASCII, OT1 >. > French should have < latin1, T1 >, [...] definitely no, < ASCII, OT1 > is still a good default pair for French, assuming that other pairs could be < mltex, hyphenation-with-diacritics > or < tex, standard-hyphenation > or ... English people, like French, have also good taste (i don't speak about beef ;=) and often use words with diacritics. So i think, IMHO, that the default < ASCII, OT1 > is sometimes estimated as a poor default even they don't have a lot of such words to hyphenate correctly. That's just to say that a default is never the good choice for the whole community, it's just the lowest acceptable choice. The last but not... Since standard TeX engines don't accept dynamic patterns loading (La)TeX formats should contain customized data like language patterns and thus at run time you can't expect that it's the good format for your language (the good fonts, the good patterns) etc. nor force any default depending of theses choices. You only can expect to have CM and US-English patterns, that's all. --bg