[pdftex] UTF-8 support by default

[Joseph Wright]

On 02/02/2020 14:59, notebook wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> are there any plans of making pdftex work with utf-8 characters by default?
> 
> I know, that there is XeLaTeX, which claims to support utf-8 by default 
> (which is only a claim, but not the entire truth).
> 
> The reason for asking here is, because I think it would be nice to have 
> the default tool offer everything needed for writing a text document. 
> The current situation puts the user in need of understanding encodings 
> first.
> 
> 
> Regards
> Chris

pdfTeX is never going to be native UTF-8, unlike XeTeX or LuaTeX. With 
LaTeX, the use of active chars allows UTF-8 as the default encoding, but 
that code is not something anyone is going to add to plain pdfTeX.

Joseph

P.S. XeTeX *is* natively UTF-8, so I'm unsure what you mean by 'it's 
only a claim'.