Hello Mildred,
It sounds like you're trying to reinvent the wheel, and I can
understand your desire for it (although I don't share it at all); but it
also sounds like you haven't looked deep enough into the existing tools:
> I still plan to
> eventually move to LuaTeX when it will recognize unicode characters.
LuaTeX interprets its input as UTF-8 byte sequences, and handles
characters by their Unicode code point internally. Thus, it does
recognize Unicode characters perfectly well; you seem to be expecting
something more, but you should describe it more precisely (and maybe not
on this list).
> The
> other reasons being that I want to learn low-level TeX
If you want that, you should start by reading the TeX book and the
LuaTeX reference, which are perfectly well documented. There is simply
no way out.
Arthur
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