On Wed, Nov 02, 2011 at 12:21:49PM +0000, Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
> Ross Moore wrote: > > >My advice is simply that if you restrict yourself to ASCII > >letters, then you will not face any difficulties. > >This is pure pragmatism; nothing less. > > As was Knuth's decision to base TeX on US-ASCII. > > Fortunately, FMi and others were able to convince > him that he was wrong, whence TeX 3. Now we clearly > need to start on Adobe (and Heiko !). Why? For destinations the data type is "byte string" that covers much more encodings than you can think of. But the tools inbetween apply restrictions (plain TeX, LaTeX, XeTeX, xdvipdfmx, ...). And for example, XeTeX adds the restriction that arbitrary 8-bit bytes cannot be written. A severe restriction when dealing with binary formats and arbitrary data. Yours sincerely Heiko Oberdiek -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
