[XeTeX] XeTeX at GSC

[Arthur Reutenauer]

> >Direct UTF-8 input has only been made possible fairly recently, by two
> extensions to the TeX >engine called LuaTeX and XeTeX (of course, TeX
> could already process UTF-8-encoded text thanks >to appropriate macros).
> General support for Unicode properties is rather poor.
>  
>  This obviously is false! They simply forget Omega and for that matter Aleph. The
> Omega system has as its default input character set the UCS-2 characters set and
> one can easily adjust Omega to make it able to process UTF-8  encoded files.

  No, UTF-8 input is not *direct* in Omega; you need an OTP for that.
By default it inputs 8-bit characters.  And it does not process
characters in UCS-2 form, it simply handles 16-bit characters (which was
a novelty at the time, at least in Europe, but that does not make it
support Unicode – even only the BMP – out of the box).  That's precisely
the point of my project.  In any case, I see little reason to try and
improve Unicode support in Omega or Aleph which are completely abandoned
by their developers, as you said yourself, and that's why I didn't
mention them.

	Arthur