Master/texmf-dist/doc/generic/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-why-inp-font.html


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<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label why-inp-font</title>
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<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&ndash;1 (commonly known by the standard&rsquo;s
subtitle &lsquo;Latin-1&rsquo;).  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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t do this for a variety of small reasons:
<dl>
<dt>Confusion<dd> You&rsquo;ve been happily working in this mode, and for
  some reason find you&rsquo;re to switch to writing in German: the effect
  of using &ldquo;<code>&szlig;</code>&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t work.
<dt>Traditional LaTeX<dd> You lapse and write something like
  <code>\&rsquo;</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>&ndash;<i>fontenc</i> combination seems slow and
cumbersome, but it&rsquo;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>
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