[tex-live] datestamp in texcat

[Karl Berry]

    So what happens to accented characters?  Are accents stripped?  

Yes.  We see no viable alternative.  Not everyone's terminal runs UTF-8
(by a long shot), or any other single encoding.  Therefore we have to
fall back to 7 bits or output garbage for some people.  Such as life.

For pretty descriptions, use the Catalogue on the web.
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/catalogue.html
(I realize that doesn't especially help TLU, though.)

The key function that does the ASCII-ification is the Perl module
Text::Unicode (on CPAN).  Manuel found it and made the changes.

karl