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Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Date:         Thu, 3 Dec 92 17:17:00 +0100
From: Frank Poppe <POPPE@SWOV.NL>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
To: Multiple Recipients of <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Subject:      Re: accents
Status: R
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J%org Knappen wrote:
JK> On accents
JK>
JK> I just wrote a proposal to VMSTEX-L, that I'd like an TeX implementation
JK> which would recognise the main 8 bit character sets on VAXen and can choose
JK> between them by the use of a qualifier (like those -flags under @N@X).
JK>
JK> However, here is another idea which might be interesting, allthough I'm not
JK> sure if it may violate the principles of TeX:
JK>
JK> Use some kind of ``structured comment'' at the beginning of a .tex file. I
JK> have seen a thing like this on the Atari, where a line like
JK> %macropackage=lplain
JK> causes the implementation to choose the right format automatically.
JK>
JK> Here I'm thinking of of structured comment like
JK> %characterset=latin1
JK> to cause the implementation automatically to choose the right character
JK> conversion table.
JK>
JK> Think this proposal needs some discussion, since the structured comments
JK> need standardisation to be really usefull.
JK>

Since the format and the characterset are linked quite closely to
the input-file, this is worth considering.

It does NOT have to violate some TeX-rule.
The CS-TeX approach for the Atari has a shell that looks at the first
line(s) of the input file to see whether the format is defined. If it
is, it starts TeX with the proper format specified.
This way TeX itself is not involved.

Frank Poppe