Return-Path: Received: from video.uic.vsu.ru ([62.76.169.38] verified) by vsu.ru (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 3.2b8) with ESMTP id 1172778 for CyrTeX-en@vsu.ru; Mon, 20 Dec 1999 15:21:48 +0300 Sender: vvv@video.uic.vsu.ru To: CyrTeX-en@vsu.ru Subject: Re: The "letter-input" religion References: From: Vladimir Volovich Date: 20 Dec 1999 15:22:20 +0300 In-Reply-To: Laurent Siebenmann's message of "Mon, 20 Dec 1999 12:59:22 +0100" Message-ID: Lines: 28 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0802 (Gnus v5.8.2) Emacs/20.5 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Dear Laurent, "LS" == Laurent Siebenmann writes: LS> ** << Every letter should be input by TeX with category "letter" LS> (i.e. category code 11). >> LS> LaTeX does not accept this and currently inputs most cyrillic LS> characters with category "active" (=13). i think that's not fully correct: LaTeX recommends one to use inputenc package for processing texts with 8-bit input encodings; but LaTeX will still work fine if one will not use inputenc; then one has to ensure to use an alternative re-encoding mechanism (such as TCX or TCP). LS> Malyshev's various TeX systems have all permitted users to LS> respect this tenet if they wish. The same is valid for standard LaTeX's approach which permits users to respect that tenet if they wish. On the other hand, inputenc has some advantages like independence from non-standard extensions (TCX/TCP), more accurate/full support for input encodings (inachievable with TCX/TCP -- i mean constructing accentsd glyphs on the fly, and taking them from other fonts, etc), and support for Unicode bookmarks in PDFs. These and some other advantages explain why inputenc is a recommended approach, and why TCX/TCP are not recommended.