Why bother with inputenc and fontenc?
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.
In this circumstance, why should one bother with inputenc
and fontenc? Since they’re pretty exactly mirroring each
other, one could do away with both, and use just t1enc,
despite its shortcomings.
One doesn’t do this for a variety of small reasons:
- Confusion
- 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 “
ß{
}” is somewhat startling, since T1
and Latin-1 treat the codepoint differently.
- Compatibility
- 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.
- Traditional LaTeX
- You lapse and write something like
\’
e
rather than typing é
; only fontenc
has the means to convert this LaTeX sequence into the T1
character, so an \
accent
primitive slips through into the
output, and hyphenation is in danger.
The inputenc–fontenc combination seems slow and
cumbersome, but it’s safe.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=why-inp-font