Re: [Texmacs-dev] A few small patches

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Dear Norbert,

On Fri, Oct 09, 2009 at 09:25:24PM +0100, Norbert Nemec wrote:
> if I recall correctly, I put the fontenc in only for its side-effect: 
> Without fontenc, non-ascii characters in the source are simply dropped. 
> With fontenc and without inputenc, they are simply passed through 
> without reencoding. This is a rather fragile approach, but it is the 
> only way to get correct results.
>
> [The real core issue here is that TeXmacs does not really have an 
> internal encoding. It simply handles byte strings and leaves it to the 
> font to translate them into a graphical representation without ever 
> knowing what the characters mean. This makes correct export virtually 
> impossible.]
> 
> One could make the \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} dependent on whether there 
> are non-ascii characters in the written latex. This, however, would need 
> to be checked explicitely at some point. Currently, there is no way to 
> determine it easily.

Do we really need non-ascii characters? The generated LaTeX files will
be more portable if we avoid non-ascii characters alltogether.
Only if the user allows the converter to put catcodes in the preamble,
we should allow for non-ascii characters, and add the necessary catcodes.
 
Best wishes, --Joris