[tex-live] Technical showstopper

[Vladimir Volovich]

"FP" == Fabrice Popineau writes:

 >> Hmm, I get in the toc file: \contentsline {section}{\numberline
 >> {1}L'\'edition}{1} and nothing of ^^e9 and it was latex-ed
 >> correctly!

 FP> Ok, I was right assuming it would be the same under LaTeX and
 FP> under ConTeXt/Plain TeX,

s/was right/was NOT right/ ;-)

 FP> because inputenc seems to change the way accented characters are
 FP> handled.

indeed, inputenc writes 8-bit characters to files in
encoding-independent form (LICR - LaTeX Internal Character
Representation), which is independent of any locale, which is the only
portable way to deal with this: font encoding might be often different
from input encoding, and there may be several font encodings used in a
document (as well as several input encodings too).

 FP> But try this foo.tex :

 FP> % Langue et codage %----------------- \useencoding[ffr]
 FP> \mainlanguage[fr] \enableregime[il1] % idem inputenc=latin1

 FP> \starttext \startbuffer[foo] Essayons des accents : éàèôîûëïüç
 FP> \stopbuffer

 FP> \typebuffer[foo] \stoptext

 FP> and do 'texexec --pdf foo'

 FP> The fact is that characters that are written to file by TeX are
 FP> using the ^^ notation, because they are not affected by the
 FP> locale anymore.

does this create serious problems for these formats (Plain/ConTeXt)?
i.e. when they read characters in ^^ notation, are the results
different from reading the corresponding 8-bit characters? BTW, the ^^
notation has been the default in TeX for the 8-bit characters for a
long time. so if someone wishes to change to non-standard way TeX
writes 8-bit chars to files, why not use the non-standard option like
--translate-file ?

Best,
v.