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In-Reply-To:  <14384.30231.698701.576525@Wincenty.nowhere.edu.pl>; from Marcin
              Wolinski on Mon, Nov 15, 1999 at 10:07:35PM +0100
Date:         Tue, 16 Nov 1999 10:34:51 +0100
From: Eric Brunet <ebrunet@CLIPPER.ENS.FR>
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: babel 3.7 beta release
Status: R

On Mon, Nov 15, 1999 at 10:07:35PM +0100, Marcin Wolinski wrote:
> Denis B. Roegel wrote:
> > French should have < latin1, T1 >, Russian could have < koi8-r, X2 >, etc.
> > These encodings would then just be triggered when one writes
> > \selectlanguage{french}, etc. I haven't tried the new version of babel,
>
> Unfortunatelly many input encodings can be appropriate for a given
> language (e.g. for Polish we have at least 3 widely used encodings),
> and it may be difficult to judge, which of them should be default
> (this may depend on the operating system).  So it probably is not such
> a good idea to have global defaults.

Why not ? There is no way it can hurt. If there are three encoding for
polish, then one third of the users will be happy that a default exists,
and nothing will change for two thirds of the users nor in good, nor in
bad. On the other hand I can understand that you don't want to choose the
default encoding and get insults by e-mail from 2/3 of the Poles, but if
this choice is done, it's for everybody's benefit.

In all case there is absolutely no reason to not establish a default for
languages where the (input|font)encoding is evident. I am giving every
year practical introducting lessons to LaTeX2e to french students with no
computer background, and I always have a bad time to justify why every
document must contain

        \usepackage[babel]{francais}
        \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
        \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

The goal of these practical lessons is to show an alternative to ms-word
to humanities student who will have to write down thesis, and you can bet
these kinds of details don't help.


Éric Brunet