[XeTeX] inputenc for XeTeX

[Will Robertson]

Dear all,

I'm sure you're all aware of the problems that new users face switching 
to XeTeX; one of the most common mistakes is to call inputenc:

    \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

In TeX Live 2009, I'd like to fix that up. After all, writing that 
above should simply continue to process the file in UTF8 mode.

If it works well enough we'll do our best to include it as part of the 
official inputenc  package in TeX Live 2009. If anyone would like to 
test it out I'd greatly welcome feedback. I've got a beta version of a 
package here called "xetex-inputenc":
  <http://github.com/wspr/xetex-inputenc/tree/master>

The aim of the package is to fix the [utf8] case mentioned above. Other 
encodings work as well, such as [ansinew] or [latin1]. However, some 
third party packages that write material to an auxiliary file will end 
up breaking because it's impossible to flag when they're reading in the 
XeTeX-generated material. Such is life... but who uses XeTeX to process 
new documents with older encodings, right? :-)

Many thanks,
Will