Re: [Texmacs-dev] Thoughts about encodings

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 02:09:49PM +0200, Norbert Nemec wrote:
> Once we have eradicated Cork T1 that way, it should also be much easier
> to introduce UTF-8 internally, which should be reasonably close to a
> 1-to-1 mapping on universal symbols.
> 
> What do you think?

Yes, we should move towards UTF-8. As you may have noticed,
this is a very tricky thing, mainly because of the horrible
encodings we inherit from TeX/LaTeX.

As a first step, we should make strict use of
Cork + <univ-char>-style universal extension codes.
In particular, this means revamping Cyrillic,
but their may be other places where we are not strict.

At a second step, we should design an UTF-8 plane for
all TeXmacs-specific characters. This will allow us
to have a complete one-to-one correspondance.

At a third step, we have to redesign the font system,
which is overly complex and in particular get rid of
all rubber characters. We also should get rid of Metafont and
should be able to use more easily system provided fonts.

At the last step, we might internally get rid of
the current character encoding and use UTF-8.
We should keep the old tables for the support of
comprehensible names for all symbols.

Best wishes, Joris