ctan (CC Christian and Karl for information)

I'm about to upload ucs package (inputenc utf8x option)

Please mark Dominique Unruh and Wolfgang Jeltsch as inactive and add
me d.p.carlisle@gmail.com as maintainer with support URL

https://github.com/LaTeX-Package-Repositories/ucs
https://github.com/LaTeX-Package-Repositories/ucs/issues

I'll add a public announce in the upload form but basically this makes

\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}

a no-op unless ucs.sty loaded (in which case some emergency patches
are made for current latex releases).

I re-organised the ctan zip a bit, removing extensionless files, so
README.txt not README, and removing all the .def and .sty that are
generated by
tex ucs.ins
If you generate, you may end up with all these files in latex/ucs rather
than some in latex/ucs/utils but that is cosmetic, it does not matter
either way.


The main data/*.def files have been re-generated for Unicode 14 so have
some additional files.



David

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Handover from original authors:

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Dominique Unruh

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Dear David Carlisle,

I have asked a mutual colleague for Wolfgang's current mail address and
was told to try wolfgang-it@jeltsch.info.

I hope you can reach them there.

I don't want to preempt Wolfgang's response, but if you still cannot
reach them, from my side there are no objections to an emergency update.
But please check with Wolfgang first since they are the maintainer now
and I haven't touched ucs/utf8x in many years.

Best wishes,
Dominique.


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Wolfgang Jeltsch

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Dear David,

thanks a lot for reaching out to me.

I’m absolutely happy with the LaTeX team performing an emergency update
in the way you describe, including patching `ucs.sty`.

Unfortunataly, I don’t have the time to maintain `ucs.sty` anymore.
I realize that with XeTeX and LuaTeX we have now well-functioning TeX
engines that support Unicode natively, which suggests that using `ucs`
is kind of pointless these days. However, the trouble is that scientific
publishers typically want you to submit LaTeX source code and at the
same time usually don’t use Unicode-supporting TeX engines, from what I
can see. Therefore, good Unicode support for LaTeX source files is still
interesting to have for traditional TeX engines.

The `inputenc` package does a great job in this regard when it comes to
text mode. What would be needed, in my opinion, is a package that does
the same for math mode and, unlike `ucs`, is as lightweight as
`inputenc`. Is there perhaps already such a package, which I don’t know
about? I was already thinking about implementing one myself, but, well,
I don’t have the time for that right now.

All the best,
Wolfgang

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