Andre Poenitz wrote: > Or slurp in the contents of the .tex file and try various encodings > until we find one that "does the trick", possibly after cutting it > into parts for which we know that the encoding stays constant.
Yes. Note that this can become quite tricky, though: Some variable width encodings (shift-jis and big5 are examples supported by the CJK package) are not as nice as utf8, and do not guarantee that the second or third byte of a code point does not contain any byte from the ASCII range. That means that you cannot preparse the file (for cutting it into pieces) without knowing the encoding of the currently read piece. For the same reason these encodings cannot be used with standard LaTeX compilers, but AFAIK there are specialized variants that understand these encodings. Georg
