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Hi Jonathan,
here's a bug report we got in the Debian BTS about using inputenc with
XeTeX. The full conversation is at http://bugs.debian.org/434056, but
the first paragraph cited describes the wish quite well. The problem is
described in more detail in the initial messages, but maybe you're
familiar with it.
What's your view on that? TIA for your answer,
Frank
Juliusz Chroboczek <Juliusz.Chroboczek@pps.jussieu.fr> wrote:
>>> TeX, pdfTeX, Omega or XeTeX, he should be able to say
>>>
>>> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
>>>
>>> and the right thing for the current implementation of TeX should
>>> magically happen.
>
>> I suspect you can think so because you use a language
>> in which there is little difference between utf8 and
>> normal encoding, for CJK (, Arabic, Hindi, ?) I'm afraid
>> things are not going so magically ;-)
>
> Ehm... no. XeTeX uses UTF-8 for input, and so does TeX (or e-TeX, or
> pdfTeX) with utf8.def. Legacy encodings are completely irrelevant for
> this discussion.
>
> The point is that the four languages I use regularly are all covered
> by the small subset of Unicode that works correctly when you say
>
> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
> \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
>
> I realise that people for whom that is the case are a minority (there's
> probably not much more than 1.2 billion of us in the world). However,
> just because it doesn't work for most people doesn't mean it should
> stop working for us.
>
>> \usepackage{ifxetex}
>> \ifxetex\else
>> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
>> \fi
>
> Yes, i'm currently doing roughly that (but with TeX primitives rather
> than the ifxetex package). However I believe that this should be handled
> automatically by inputenc.
>
> Juliusz
--
Frank Küster
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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