[XeTeX] fontspec v1.1

[Jonathan Kew]

On 19 Oct 2004, at 7:39 am, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Ah, now I understand, the OSX encoding means utf8accents.sty (whatever 
> its name may evolve to in the future) is implicitly loaded. That makes 
> sense.
>
>> But I think the encoding matter should be sorted out as soon as 
>> possible so that we don't start proliferating files with an encoding 
>> name that may change in the future. As Ross says, there is nothing in 
>> the font definitions that would change if XeTeX was ported to another 
>> platform, so maybe my first choice of "OSX" as the encoding name was 
>> a bad bad idea.
>>
>> Perhaps XU or XUCS would be a better idea --- "XeTeX Unicode", or 
>> something along those lines. Whom does one consult when creating new 
>> encoding names?

Why the "X"? The encoding is just Unicode, not "XeTeX Unicode". "U" 
would be perfect--except that it's already taken. How about calling it 
"UNICODE"? Or if short names are preferred, "UCS" (Universal Character 
Set, another term that's used)?

> There's the new [UTF8] option of {inputenc}, but I couldn't find it 
> documented inside 
> /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/doc/latex/base/inputenc.dvi (I'm 
> all speaking of TL2004, Gerben's new experimental setup still in beta 
> test). Looking inside 
> /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/latex/base you find files 
> ot2enc.dfu, t2{a,b,c}enc.dfu, x2enc.dfu connected with UTF-8 encoding, 
> but I couldn't find inside utf8.def how their names are generated when 
> calling them, what relations the names OT2, T2 and X2 exactly bear to 
> UTF-8.
>
> So in summary I don't know which encoding name, if any, is supposed to 
> be associated with UTF-8 in standard LaTeX.

Note that the *font encoding* being Unicode is a separate issue from 
the *input encoding* being UTF-8 or something else. Standard LaTeX with 
[UTF8]{inputenc} reads UTF-8 text but uses fonts with various custom 
encodings (8r, t1, etc.); XeTeX automatically reads either UTF-8 or 
UTF-16 text (no inputenc needed), and assumes Unicode fonts (though 
there is some support for legacy TeX fonts as well).

JK