>So "·" should be admitted to produce l·l , L·L, as well as ô à and ô ß
I'm afraid the crucial characters here just appear as ?'s in my environment. What \gdef and/or character codes are we talking about? I don't know how Å and Ä¿ should be supported. And I don't know what characters you're talking about here, for the same reason. Sorry. The best that I can see at present is to declare the file encoding as ISO-8859-1, which will allow the use of the middle dot. It is better not to use literal 8-bit (or UTF-8 for that matter) characters in the txi-??.tex files. (I know some translators do, but it shuts out anyone not using that same encoding.) These simple word-by-word translation files cannot achieve anything like what Unicode does. That's a different problem. They should just do the best they can. \gdef^^b7{$^.$} that is, a superscripted full stop. Maybe it should be \cdot instead. The same could be used in \utfeightchardefs. We can use \cdot, with some extra care to ensure math mode, and it looks better than a superscripted period (not surprisingly). I'll do that. K