announce: inputenc support for utf8

[Frank Mittelbach]

there has been some discussion a while ago concerning utf8 support for LaTeX
and as a result there has been some code development to provide utf8
support via inputenc. I would add something like that to the next latex2e
release.

this is kind of beta, but perhaps one or the other might want to give it a
try. it can be found at

http://www.latex-project.org/code/experimental/utf8ienc.zip

there is also some inputenc support to allow inputenc chars being used in
math (should be used with elatex)

http://www.latex-project.org/code/experimental/inpmath.zip

best
frank

[William F Hammond]

Frank --

This is very good to have. Thanks.

Frank Mittelbach <frank.mi...@latex-project.org> writes:

> this is kind of beta, but perhaps one or the other might want to give it a
> try. it can be found at

In the range U+00A0 -- U+00FF (all of which are in the HTML 4
character set) I had noise from A0, AC, AD, and B8. I suppose A0
should become either " " in verbatim or otherwise "~". I was able to
pick up AC by using "TS1,T1" as the inputenc option. AD (soft-hyphen)
probably should bifurcate depending on whether the context is
verbatim, left-to-right, or paragraph. I know I've seen B8 (loose
cedilla) somewhere, but I'm not sure how it should be picked up here.

It would be great to have UTF-8 support at this level in the next
update of 2E.

Also I'd like to be rid of the kicks into math mode in latin1.def for
a new version called iso-8859-1.def. I know how to remove them, but
I don't know how to get them back so that they're safe for verbatim.

Thanks.

-- Bill