[XeTeX] Beginner questions

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Sat, 23 Oct 2010 17:48:46 +0200 schrieb Arthur Reutenauer:

>> Why shouldn't someone be forced to use utf8 encoding if its texts
>> use only chars from a 8bit codepage? Xetex is quite able to handle
>> them if you declare the encoding.
> 
>   Quite, but not entirely.  If you use \XeTeXinputencoding to use some
> other character set, XeTeX will still write to files using UTF-8.  You
> can hardly recommend it.

Sure one would get some auxiliary files in utf8. But where is the
problem? XeTeX will input this auxiliary files as utf8.
\XeTeXinputencoding declares only the encoding of the current file. 

It is certainly easier if all files use only one encoding. But
people do have a lot of old files in 8-bit encodings and perhaps
they don't want to convert them. So why not tell them that there is
a choice?

-- 
Ulrike Fischer