Taco Hoekwater escribió:
Hi Javier,
Let me start by saying this: If your font is set up correctly for your language, not all characters really 'have to' be active. Inputenc.sty makes them active so that it can support many encodings, but there is no real need for that.
If (for instance) é is in slot 233 of your input encoding, and you use a font encoding that has it in slot 233 as well, then it can simply be a 'letter', and you could happily use it in a control sequence.
Yes, I know that, but it is very likeky, specialy in some non-latin scripts, that your input encoding does not match the font encoding. You may argue that you can remap fonts, but be realistic, how many people actually now how to do that (and besides, it is still much simpler if you let the inputenc/fontenc packages do the thing).
In the future, even with a different font encoding, the need for all these characters to be active will disappear completely because future versions of pdfTeX will have a separation between characters and font glyphs, with a tunable remapping stage inbetween. That is really good news.
Cheers, Javier A.