Re: [help-texinfo] Non ascii to pdf.

[Karl Berry]

    they'd collide when using a naÃ¯ve 8 bit encoding

I know.  But it's still not impossible to do.  I've seen it done,
umpteen years ago.

    So, it has been possible at some point to "typeset
    UTF-8 with plain TeX" 

Of course.  It's always been *possible*, given the fonts.  However, if
you look at texinfo.tex and its extremely naive approach to fonts, you
will see that adding support for cyrillic/cjk/greek/whatever would be,
as I said, a massive undertaking.  For that matter, even just
typesetting US English with non-CM fonts is highly nontrivial to add.  I
have other things to spend time on ...

Another volunteer came close to finishing a huge rewrite of the font
mechanism but then, sadly, moved on to other things.  The world being
what it is, I will probably never get back to it.

    Alas, Omega seems a bit out of fashion these days, 

I removed Omega itself from TeX Live a few years ago.  Aleph, its
somewhat bug-fixed updated descendant, remains (and will continue to
remain) for people who have existing Omega documents.
    
    and I don't understand the mechanisms eTex (or XeT-TeX) use for font
    mapping.

etex is essentially Knuth's 8-bit tex with a few new primitives,
irrelevant to the issue at hand.

xet-tex (actually xet--tex) was never widely available and is long since
doa.

These days, there are the luatex and xetex engines, which understand
utf-8 and opentype natively.  For those who like such things.

    Should I have given the impression to be impatient 

Not at all, don't worry.  If you had, I would have sent much shorter
replies :).

Best,
karl