[texhax] Bug#446476: Bug#446476: Bug#446476: natbib cannot handle utf8

[Ralf Stubner]

On Sun, Oct 14, 2007 at 18:27 -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
>     it is not clear where they get their advice from.
> 
> Sebastian decided as best he could, many years ago.  Very little has
> changed in the set of "recommended" TL packages for a long time now.
 
At that time ucs.sty was probably the only way to use UTF-8 encoded
text for LaTeX. Nowadays inputenc.sty includes UTF-8 capabilities that
handles many cases, so that ucs.sty is more for special cases, ie more
"extra" than "recommended".
 
> Anyway, the main point here is not the classification of ucs, but rather
> the possible bug in it.  I see on
> http://www.unruh.de/DniQ/latex/unicode/ that Dominique Unruh is no
> longer able to maintain the unicode package (which contains ucs.sty),
> and a new maintainer is welcome.
> 
> Perhaps someone here would like to take it on ...

I am not sure, but the time to do this might be better spend extending
the Unicode-coverage of the UTF-8 implementation in inputenc.sty.
AFAIK that's the area where ucs.sty is still better than inputenc.sty. 

cheerio
ralf