Paul A. Rubin wrote:
The problem is all those darned foreigners with their accented
characters and Cyrillic/kanji/whatever symbols. (Note that I'm
including Mac users as foreigners, since the inputenc package
supposedly addresses them as well). When I was younger, everyone used
ASCII and damn well liked it. (Well, there was EBCDIC I suppose.)
We 'darned' always extended ASCII in various ways, because it was always
insufficient. For a clear idea of the problem: Try removing three vowels
from
ASCII, and then try writing anything serious at all. You can't. :-)
More or less cumbersome workarounds have been in use since they started
replacing
mechanical typewriters with word processing. Because you can't write
a decent business letter with just ascii.
Now, UTF-8 will probably put an end to the mess for good.
Helge Hafting
