Re: Looking for TeX/LaTeX gurus help

[Karl Berry]

Hi Patrice,

    There is \mathring in math, though I don't know if it applies in TeX

No, it doesn't.  The way you get a text ringa accent in plain TeX is
\def\ringaccent#1{{\accent23 #1}}.  Something similar could be done for
math, but it's not in plain.

    \underline could be used, it is in TeX too.

Ah.  Math for @ubaraccent should be \underbar (which uses \underline).

    > You'll want \usepackage{textcomp} for sure, it makes lots of symbols
    Ok. Are those in TeX too?

For starters, there is no \usepackage in plain TeX, as you probably
know.

I thought you weren't targeting plain TeX.  Doing that is an entirely
different situation than targeting LaTeX.  texinfo.tex already does
everything that is easy.  Going beyond texinfo.tex leads into deep
waters -- things that are unimplemented there are unimplemented for a
reason.

    Is there something similar for plain TeX? 

For unextended plain TeX with the CM fonts, see (for example),
http://www.tug.org/utilities/plain/cseq.html,
http://www.eijkhout.net/tbt,
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/teximpatient,
and of course The TeXbook.

    www.ntg.nl/doc/wilkins/pllong.pdf 

I haven't seen it before.  Doesn't claim to be reference material, so I
doubt it includes everything.

    Also in many places it is said that fontenc T1 should be used, but I
    am not sure what to do in general for fonts and charsets. If I could
    have some directions, that would be nice...

Sorry, but it's not that kind of thing that can be easily summed up.
Maybe we should come up with a plan offline.

Using T1 for the fontenc supports many European languages (with the
right fonts), and is the best default choice that I know of, but it
doesn't support everything.  It has to be thought about on a
case-by-case basis.

Thanks,
Karl