Re: [9fans] [RFC] fonts and unicode/utf [TeX]

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

On Mon Jun 20 07:17:16 EDT 2011, tlaronde@polynum.com wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 06:38:59PM -0400, erik quanstrom wrote:
> >
> > nobody cares what font encoding tex uses internally.  the
> > real issue is the input to tex.  i sure would be very reluctant
> > to load anything on my system that will mangle utf-8, especially
> > for codepoints <256.  that's the path to wchar_t.
>
> That TeX on Plan9 should accept utf-8 is not a question. But TeX has a
> present state, and kerTeX has a present state.

i'm not sure what the hard part is.  just front the normal input
function with one that calls chartorune and rejects anything above
codepoint 255.  that can't be more than 10 lines of code.

that way there is no possibility of latin1 nonsense breaking previously-
functional .tex files, and you don't have to change any assumptions
in the code.  (it might be better later on to operate directly on utf-8
rather than some sort of wide character format like a rune, but that
can't break existing .tex files.)

- erik