The package represents an outdated mechanism for reading ISO Latin-1 (ISO/IEC 8859-1) by means of setting the printing glyphs in the upper half of the character set to category code "active", and defining them all.

While this mechanism is broadly that employed by the standard LaTeX inputenc package, the standard package has several advantages, including a more satisfactory approach to undefined character codes, better integration with other input encodings and generally improved robustness.

See also inputenc.

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