Dan,
I won't try to cover any of the ground that John McChesney-Young has covered in his post, except to say that that is also my sense of the state of LaTeX right now: support for UTF-8 is still clunky, and Unicode/OpenType fonts are not natively supported. To judge from its website the promising Omega project seems to have stalled.
I'm wondering if you've considered XSL-FO as a way to get from TEI to PDF. Apache's FOP (see http://xml.apache.org/fop/) is supposed to be a good free implementation. If I recall correctly, earlier versions of FOP used TeX or LaTeX to output PDF files, but now it outputs directly to PDF. There's a great advantage to staying within XML to do a job like producing a PDF: you use an XSLT script to output an FO file, and then send that to FOP.
There are also commercial products for working with FO (here's one with a free academic license: http://www.renderx.com/download/academic.html), and some of them sound far easier to use than FOP. Being rather perverse, I'd probably stick with FOP myself. I'll bet there's some experience getting TEI to FOP on this list.
Peter
Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
The Digital Medievalist List (see end of message for contact information and project URLs).
Hi all, I've been playing with LaTex (actually MikTex) as a TEI2PDF conversion 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? Recent discussion (i.e. Feb 2005) on the various mailing lists archived at TUG seem to suggest this is something that is difficult to do and won't really be resolved until LaTeX 3. I'm sure members here have some practical experience. Thanks. -dan
P.S. I'm cross posting this in tei-l; apologies for the double messages.