"LS" == Laurent Siebenmann writes:

 >> about that language switching thing - it will always be needed

 LS> True with TeX, false with Omega.  Just as many Bakoma users
 LS> "stack" Russian and English into one 256 char encoding and
 LS> hyphenation scheme, Omega users (using their near infinite 256^2
 LS> capacity) can stack German Russian and Polish (disjointly) into
 LS> one vf encoding and one hyphenation scheme.  This involves
 LS> something less rigid than basic unicode.

not true. German and Polish are based on latin alphabet, and neither
TeX nor Omega can know that some particular word which contains latin
letters (and even accented latin letters) belongs to Polish or to
German.

so language switching tags are still needed.

and in general such combined patterns are not so good idea, imho.
they work more or less for english+russian, but it is a hack.

 LS> Can anyone report recent progress in keyboarding/editing?

there are no problems with Emacs (which runs on Windows, Mac, Unix,
etc) with editing texts in UTF-8 encoding.

Best,
v.