[pdftex] Open type fonts / Omega / ...

[Sebastian Rahtz]

On Tue, Feb 05, 2002 at 03:47:30PM +0000, Michael Chapman wrote:
> 
> Good _old_  TeX was plain ASCII, unless I'm wrong, nut now we have methods 
> for both input and output encoding.

well, sort of. TeX was/is an 8 bit engine, so it read
8 bit characters one at a time, and can then do whatever you
want with them. That includes handling UTF-8. If you want to handle
UTF-16, that too can be done moderately easily. The interesting part
is what you do with the character internally! Thats where Omega
does better.

> I was getting the feeling that the days of receiving non-ASCII single byte 
> encoded text files were numbered, and that before long everything 

TeX doesnt care about encoding per se....

> (idealistically!) will be in a UCS flavour (with UTF-8) as a front runner, 
> perhaps?
> I just cannot see myself  (?ourselves) feeding say French text in UTF-8 
> through a converter to get 'old' ISO-8859-1 to feed into pdfLatex ... but I 
> have been wrong before.

people do it. but its not needed. handling UTF8 is really
perfectly reasonable with any TeX-based engine.
 
-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      OUCS Information Manager
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431