Modern TeX implementations like XeTeX and LuaTeX handle UTF-8 natively and also bring all sorts of benefits like OpenType support (automagic ligatures, real small caps, selectable lining or old-style figures and more) and the ability to define fonts from the system font pool rather than using archaic incantations and magic scrolls from the early 90s. The problem is that these modern implementations are HUGE. On the average Linux system, TeX, LaTeX and other paraphernalia seem to take up well over 1 GB these days. I've given up on TeX because it's just so darn big.
There is, however, hope. Heirloom troff manages to include many of the same whizz-bang typographic features as XeTeX and friends (including Unicode support, smartfont support, easy loading of fonts in modern formats) while taking up about 1/100th the resource footprint. Clearly what we REALLY need is a filter that takes LaTeX sources and processes them into TROFF commands to feed to a port of Heirloom troff ;) Mike
