[tex-live] change list for doc

[David Kastrup]

karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) writes:

> I've written up a first cut at the list of changes in TL 2004,
> excepting anything relating to Windows, which will have to come
> later (*).

Well, I saw the following from the last year:

    TEX, METAFONT, and MetaPost now, by default, output 8-bit input
    characters as themselves in output (e.g., \write) files, log
    files, and the terminal, i.e., not translated using the ^^
    notation. In TEX Live 7, this translation was dependent on the
    system locale settings; now, locale settings do not influence the
    TEX programs' behavior. If for some reason you need the ^^ output,
    rename the file texmf/web2c/cp8bit.tcx. (Future releases will have
    cleaner ways to control this.)

I lost track of the discussion and don't know what the state of this
year is.  However, if it is the same as the above, I would want to
point out that with utf8 input, the error context that TeX provides
will contain partially unicode sequences after the possible ... at the
start of an error context and before the possible ... at the end of an
error context.

I also don't know what this will make of shown boxes with utf-8
characters.

Multibyte and TeX are not pretty.  And this holds for Omega as well,
since it uses the same TeX/web2c mechanisms at that level.

So if TeX is still transparent, a warning about the effects on utf-8
might be appropriate.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum