(Con)TeX(t), Unicode and accented characters

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec1@email.si>]

Here's a short version of my question:

How do I enable unicode encoded characters (just normal accented latin 
characters) to be typeset in (any font) in ConTeXt, like the 
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} in LaTeX?

And here the long one:

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I don't really understand how accented characters are typeset in 
(Con)TeX(t). One of the main reasons for switching to LaTeX (maybe 8 
years ago) someone mentioned was: "You don't have to worry about 
accented characters. You can make any accented character and it will 
work all over the world." (We actually did have lots of problems with MS 
Word and web browsers at that time.) And it was true.

But when I switched to ConTeXt I came against that problem again.

In LaTeX I used
     \v{c}\v{s}\v{z}
at first, later
     \usepackage{csz} ... "c"s"z
(which works pretty much the same as "a"o"u in German)
and finally (when someone told me about that possibility)
     \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} ... čšž

As I didn't know how to use any other the font, I always used CMR, the 
default, so I didn't have problems with exotic fonts either.

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But here we come to ConTeXt.
For the German "Umlaut", \"{a}\"{o}\"{u} (äöü), this was satisfactory:

     \useencoding[windows-1250]
     \mainlanguage[de]

For \v{c}\v{s}\v{z} (čšž) this wasn't the case, so a proposed solution 
from another ConTeXt user was:

     % output=pdf -translate-file=cp1250cs
     \setupbodyfont
         [csr,ams,rm]

What I don't really understand: why did the Chech TUG have to design 
*their own font*, csr, (or made changes to cmr) if accented characters 
worked perfectly already in plain TeX?

The second problem: This works under Windows when typesetting in code 
page 1250. How can I use accented characters if text is typeset in 
Unicode (or latin2) in Linux?

The third problem: How do I typeset '\v{c}' in some other font? I do 
understand that it may not function in just any font since someone has 
to tell the computer how the accented characters are built, but as long 
as \v{c} works, there's no reason for
     \useencoding[utf8]
and then continuing with unicode encoded characters not to produce the 
desired result.

Thank you,
     Mojca