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


1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31

<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&#8211;1 (commonly known by the standard&#8217;s
subtitle &#8216;Latin-1&#8217;).  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&#8217;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&#8217;t do this for a variety of small reasons:
<dl>
<dt>Confusion<dd> You&#8217;ve been happily working in this mode, and for
  some reason find you&#8217;re to switch to writing in German: the effect
  of using &#8220;<code>&#223;</code>&#8221; 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&#8217;t work.
<dt>Traditional LaTeX<dd> You lapse and write something like
  <code>\&#8217;</code><code>e</code> rather than typing <code>&#233;</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>&#8211;<i>fontenc</i> combination seems slow and
cumbersome, but it&#8217;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>