[XeTeX] [XeLaTeX-MikTeX 2.7] compilation error with french characters

[Jonathan Kew]

On 20 May 2008, at 6:00 pm, Alain PIERRE wrote:

> ....
> \begin{document}
>
> les minuscules: à, â, æ, ç, é, è, ê, ë, î, ï, ô, œ, ù, û, ü, ÿ
> les majuscules: À, Â, Æ, Ç, É, È, Ê, Ë, Î, Ï, Ô, Œ, Ù, Ü, Ÿ
>
> \end{document}
> ---
>
> compilation is interrupted with the following message (translated
> from french)...
>
> "xelatex.exe encountered a problem and must close. Blablabla..."
>
> See french-babel_log.txt in attachment.

What text encoding are you using for your document? All those  
"missing character" warnings in your log make me suspect there's  
character encoding confusion. I'm guessing that maybe your file is in  
an 8-bit Windows encoding (codepage 1252, probably). You should use  
Unicode (UTF-8), unless you want to make special efforts to tell  
xetex that you're using something else.

(It still shouldn't crash, of course; the first thing to check is  
whether that still happens with the latest version, as I see your  
version is slightly old, and the processing of incorrectly-encoded  
text may have changed.)

JK