🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <376D2A8E.4AFE99A8@drfc.cad.cea.fr>, "Seak, Teng-Fong" <seak@drfc.cad.cea.fr> writes...
>     Lo and behold!  I just found that we can type Latin-1 letters
>directly in LaTeX files!  

Yes.

>     Now my first question is: Is Latin-1 supported in LaTeX by
>defaults?

No.  I mean support is part of LaTeX, but the default input handling and
the�default font sets do not allow it.l  Al you need to do is decl
that you want to use Latin-1.

There are two ways, and often people use both.

The most obvious way is to use fonts that have near-Latin-1 character 
layout.

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

(T1,�LY1, ... )

By default, LaTeX chooses the original Computer Modern fonts in the
non-Latin-1 "OT1" encoding.

If you want decent hyphenation of your accented text, you must use
a proper font encoding.

The second way is to automatically convert accented input characters
to their old style commands like \'e.  This might be useful when there
is no font encoding to match your input character set.

\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

>my exported LaTeX file.  Furthermore, I suppose that for those using
>other char-sets, eg Latin-2 or under a Mac, when they compile their
>LaTeX file containing non-ASCII characters, I think they won't get what
>they wanted.  Isn't it?

This is where inputenc comes in handy:  All they have to do is specify
the relevant input encoding; e.g., 

\usepackage[applemac]{inputenc}

>     My next and last question is: Is there any plan to support Unicode
>in LaTeX?  People like me use a lot of Greek letters and some Hebrew
>letters as symbols.  I really find it easier to read a real "alpha"
>letter than \alpha.

Not that I know of ... well, not in the near future.

Donald Arseneau                         asnd@triumf.ca