[texhax] Difficulty with using PCTeX to compile a .txt file in Unicode

[Oleg Katsitadze]

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 10:55:27AM -0500, Axel E. Retif wrote:
> On  24 Oct, 2009, at 09:22, Adam M. Goldstein wrote:
>> without the use of additional packages, TeX and 
>> LaTeX will only process ASCII text. UTF8 won't work either.
>
> Yes, of course you're right ---you would have to put
>
> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

Note that UTF8 is backwards-compatible with ASCII, so if the text is
strictly ASCII saving it as UTF8 will produce an ASCII text file
(except maybe for the dumb BOM on Windows).

> in your preamble (is there support for utf16? I don't find anything)

While possible (probably), a package would not be sufficient, it would
have to be done at the format file level or (even better) TeX engine
level, because in UTF16 all characters (even ASCII) are at least a
two-byte word.

Best,
Oleg