Bug#434056: Inputenc and XeTeX don't work together

[Juliusz Chroboczek <Juliusz.Chroboczek@pps.jussieu.fr>]

>> TeX, pdfTeX, Omega or XeTeX, he should be able to say
>> 
>>   \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
>> 
>> and the right thing for the current implementation of TeX should
>> magically happen.

> I suspect you can think so because you use a language
> in which there is little difference between utf8 and
> normal encoding, for CJK (, Arabic, Hindi, ?) I'm afraid
> things are not going so magically ;-)

Ehm... no.  XeTeX uses UTF-8 for input, and so does TeX (or e-TeX, or
pdfTeX) with utf8.def.  Legacy encodings are completely irrelevant for
this discussion.

The point is that the four languages I use regularly are all covered
by the small subset of Unicode that works correctly when you say

  \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

I realise that people for whom that is the case are a minority (there's
probably not much more than 1.2 billion of us in the world). However,
just because it doesn't work for most people doesn't mean it should
stop working for us.

> \usepackage{ifxetex}
> \ifxetex\else
> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
> \fi

Yes, i'm currently doing roughly that (but with TeX primitives rather
than the ifxetex package).  However I believe that this should be handled
automatically by inputenc.

                                        Juliusz