Unicode, Greek and special characters (was [OS X TeX] BibDesk and Unicode (was: BibTeX problems)

[Mark Smith]

Jason Davies wrote:

>what is implicated here though..I don't know XeLaTeX (these things are
>getting harder to type...). will Gerben's setup choke on this or is
>saving those files at UTF-8 tantamount to switching? (Can I still use
>TeXShop? etc...)

I'll let someone else give you a detailed professional answer here.

My amateurish one is that you are not switching, you can continue to use your editor, bib manager, previewer etc. of choice, but for those files which contain unicode characters, you won't be able to *process* them via "normal" LaTeX or TeX w/o converting them back to "ASCII"


>is there a good reference  point (eg web page) for these questions and
>all the onse I haven't thought of that you (or anyone else) knows?
>thanks (as ever...)

If you mean for people that are not sure about the components and the work flow already, then, no that I'm aware of. Various aspects TeX, LaTeX, XeTeX, ConTeXt, BibTeX, pdf[__]tex, is well documented, but maybe some kind of graphical representation of how everything interacts with some basic explanations (and links to more detailed info) about text encoding, font types, processsing engines and output formats would be a valuable resource for "beginners" ?

Some kind of hybrid wiki / expert system with a flow chart front end might be a way to go ?

/prepares for the probable responses:

        - "lousy idea"
        - "been there, done that" <link> 
        - "great idea, when are you starting ?"
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