Cork encoding

In 8-bit TeX engines the font encoding has to match the encoding of hyphenation patterns where this encoding is most commonly used. In LaTeX one can switch to this encoding with \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}, while in ConTeXt MkII this is the default encoding already. In modern engines such as XeTeX and LuaTeX Unicode is fully supported and the 8-bit font encodings are obsolete.

The encoding supports most European languages written in Latin alphabet. Notable exceptions are:

• Esperanto and Maltese language (using IL3)
• Latvian language and Lithuanian language (using L7X)
• Welsh language

Languages with slightly suboptimal support include:

• Galician language, Portuguese language and Spanish language, due to the lack of characters ª and º, which are not superscript versions of lowercase "a" and "o" (superscripts are thinner) and they are often underlined
• Croatian language, Bosnian language, Serbian language, due to the shared use of the slot for Đ
• Turkish language, due to dotless i having different uppercase and lowercase combinations than in other languages
• Romanian language, due to the characters "Ş ş Ţ ţ" (with a cedilla) being typographically considered incorrect by modern standards, with the expected correct forms being "Ș ș Ț ț" (with a comma below) - though when the encoding was developed, it was arguably considered acceptable at that time, but the status of support retroactively changed to suboptimal or insufficient when the Unicode codepoints were disunified.