[texhax] How to write straight accents in TeX (not LaTeX!)

[Karl Berry]

    I feel that there should be a better way of doing this

Modulo XeTeX et al. with native Unicode support, there is no better way.
LaTeX does the same thing -- that's just how TeX works.

The amazing thing is that Knuth was able to implement something so many
years before "internationalization" even existed as a word that can
nevertheless be adaptable today.  He never thought control sequences
would be used for general input in non-English languages, but it wasn't
a problem he could solve, back then.

Anyway, I have a dim recollection of a plain tex macro package being
posted to CTAN fairly recently to handle 8-bit input, but I couldn't
find it in a bit of searching.  Sorry.  (It's not the fontch package,
which I don't think does anything on the input side.)

karl