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+<head>
+<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label why-inp-font</title>
+</head><body>
+<h3>Why bother with <i>inputenc</i> and <i>fontenc</i>?</h3>
+<p>The standard input encoding for Western Europe (pending the arrival of
+Unicode) is ISO 8859-1 (commonly known by the standard's
+subtitle 'Latin-1'). Latin-1 is remarkably close, in the codepoints
+it covers, to the (La)TeX T1 encoding.
+<p>In this circumstance, why should one bother with <i>inputenc</i>
+and <i>fontenc</i>? Since they're pretty exactly mirroring each
+other, one could do away with both, and use just <i>t1enc</i>,
+despite its <a href="FAQ-t1enc.html">shortcomings</a>.
+<p>One doesn't do this for a variety of small reasons:
+<dl>
+<dt>Confusion<dd> You've been happily working in this mode, and for
+ some reason find you're to switch to writing in German: the effect
+ of using "<code>&szlig;</code>" is somewhat startling, since T1
+ and Latin-1 treat the codepoint differently.
+<dt>Compatibility<dd> You find yourself needing to work with a
+ colleague in Eastern Europe: their keyboard is likely to be set to
+ produce Latin-2, so that the simple mapping doesn't work.
+<dt>Traditional LaTeX<dd> You lapse and write something like
+ <code>\'</code><code>e</code> rather than typing <code>&eacute;</code>; only <i>fontenc</i>
+ has the means to convert this LaTeX sequence into the T1
+ character, so an <code>\</code><code>accent</code> primitive slips through into the
+ output, and hyphenation is in danger.
+</dl>
+The <i>inputenc</i>-<i>fontenc</i> combination seems slow and
+cumbersome, but it's safe.
+<p><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=why-inp-font">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=why-inp-font</a>
+</body>