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The future of LaTeX Unicode support The future of LaTeX Unicode support

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Submitted by cbearden. on 2007-09-20 13:24. Printing
The maintainer of ucs.sty is no longer working on the package.

In this comp.text.tex posting about a bug in the ucs.sty package (which supports the use of Unicode in LATEX, and which we use in our PDF generation) it emerges that the package maintainer is no longer supporting it.

So now I need to look into the following:

  • How important is ucs.sty to our goal of publishing content in non-English languages?
  • Are there known bugs in the package that affect us?
At present, I don't even know what exactly ucs.sty does for us--what would happen, e.g., if I simply commented it out of the document prologues? There could be alternate ways of handling text in other languages, such as converting our UTF-8 to some encoding agreeable to the TeX tools for a non-English language. Perhaps we conditionalize some declarations in the document prologues depending on the language. My suspicion is that we may need to do this anyway to handle language-specific issues not related to encoding, such as word-breaking in Japanese. In fact, we may well have to use something other than pdflatex to build the PDFs for for non-English languages.

This set of issues is on the back burner until after core assemble-on-demand gets done, though.

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