Daniel Paul O'Donnell wrote in part:
I've been playing with LaTex (actually MikTex) as a TEI2PDFconversion method, and I have a question about unicode support for LaTex that members of this list might have a better handle on than the TUG group seems to. What is the best method of handling UTF-8 XML code in LaTeX2e? ... >>
I was quite distressed last fall when I opened the brand-new 4th edition of Kopka and Daly and found no entry in the index under Unicode. The even more recent second edition of _The Latex Companion_ is a little better (check the index under "UTF-8"; there's still no "Unicode" entry), but the situation is still pretty sketchy from what I understand. LaTeX & Unicode will in theory work with the characters in [inputenc] encodings (e.g., Latin 1 and Latin 2), and there's support for CKJ with the difficult-to-set-up [ucs] package, but it's not as easy nor complete as it seems like it should be after all these years - a constant refrain about fonts in general on the TeX lists, by the way.
Progress does seem to be being made, though; see e.g. the TUGboat EuroTeX 2003 Proceedings Table of Contents:
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/contents24-3.html
You might also find parts of the 2005 Conference Preprints .pdf useful (4.6 MB; linked at:)
http://www.dante.de/dante/events/eurotex/
I'm far from an expert, but you might want to look into (and ask on the lists for) Aleph and Omega:
http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/aleph
http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/omega
If by chance you haven't tried it already, the newsgroup news:comp.text.tex might be worth approaching, or one of the archived search results at Google Groups:
http://groups-beta.google.com/
using the search string:
unicode xml group:comp.text.tex
might prove useful. The first result that comes up looks at first glance particularly promising.
If you're not wedded to LaTeX2e, you might consider one of its cousins, the cutting-edge cross-platform implementation of TeX called ConTeXt:
http://contextgarden.net/Main_Page
See for the Unicode side:
http://contextgarden.net/Encodings_and_Regimes
and for the XML side:
ConTeXt also has a very active mailing list:
http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
From what I've gathered from discussions on that mailing list, almost anything you can do in LaTeX you can also do in ConTeXt; often if if something is not currently possible, the developers will come up with a solution and incorporate it in the next minor update a month or two down the road. The user (and developer) base is much smaller than for LaTeX and there are no (!) books and the documentation is not always as helpful as one might want, but the recent founding of ConTeXt Garden has helped make the implementation a good deal more intelligible than it was, say, a year ago.
Alternatively, if switching to Mac OS X is an option, bleeding-edge (so-called by its main developer, Jonathon Kew) XeTeX:
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex
is platform-specific but allows you to use any fonts in the system without having to generate new files, name them in special & esoteric ways, and put them in the right place - the kind of thing that tends to drive new users of LaTeX back to WYSIWYG. Note also the link to the active XeTeX mailing list at the above page.
Sorry not to be of more specific help, but I hope these will provide some leads to those who can offer better assistance.
John