[OS X TeX] Diacritic accents directly in source file

[Cyril Niklaus]

Hello,
Maybe more knowledgeable people will correct me if I'm saying stupid 
things, in the meantime I'll do my best.
On Vendredi, novembre 8, 2002, at 10:35 AM, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote
>  Is there a way to get the Mac OS to automatically encode all text 
> files in Unicode or is that a text editor related feature? Can it be 
> done through TeXShop? What does exactly the line "%!iTeXMac(charset): 
> UTF-8" do, is it exclusive to iMacTeX or does it force editors in 
> general to encode in Unicode?
The encoding used when saving your files is editor-related. Last I 
looked TeXShop could not save files using UTF-8, which is why I looked 
again at iMacTeX. Jérôme Laurens kindly explained how to do it in his 
email dated Oct. 15 2002 on this list, ie to use the string 
%!iTeXMac(charset): UTF-8.

> 	On the other hand, what exactly is lambda and how do I use it? I know 
> you told me you are not that much of a master on it but if you got it 
> to work then you certainly know more about it than me! Can lambda just 
> typeset any LaTeX document without a hiccup as if it were a natural 
> replacement? And finally, why would I use it instead of LaTeX?
Lambda is a replacement for LaTeX, and compiles all the LaTeX files 
without hiccups. Just type lambda file.tex instead of latex file.tex. 
You would need to use it in order to produce files in various scripts 
(Arabic, Thai, Japanese etc.) using Unicode encodings. I use it to have 
readable Sanskrit transliteration in my files, and to be able to work 
on my files both on my FreeBSD laptop and my OS X desktop.
If you're just thinking about getting accents in your text without 
sharing the source, it is probably overkill. Use the encoding lines 
others have given. These allow you to use the accents directly and not 
as TeX macros, which is way faster to type (I did a set of macros in 
Nisus Writer to change from "normal accented" input to the full blown 
TeX macros before I used Omega).

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