[OS X TeX] XeTeX and unicode characters

[Jonathan Kew]

On 31 Jan 2005, at 7:00 am, Peter Pagin wrote:

> Thanks for the hint, Herb and Jonathan.
> When I comment out "\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}" the unicode error 
> messages disappear from the console. However, the unicode characters 
> nevertheless do not appear on the pdf output.
>

What font(s) are you using, then? I'm guessing that perhaps your 
document is still using the CM fonts; that won't work for real Unicode 
text in XeTeX, because those fonts do not support extended-Latin 
Unicode characters.

(LaTeX with "\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}" deals with them by mapping 
the UTF-8 byte sequences to LaTeX control sequences that construct 
accented characters, etc., from the individual glyphs in the CM fonts. 
Which works fine, but is specific to those particular fonts, which use 
their own unique encoding schemes, not Unicode.)

To use Unicode text with XeTeX, you should also select a 
Unicode-compliant font that supports the ranges of Unicode characters 
that you're interested in using. For the accented letters used in 
common European languages, any of the standard OS X fonts should be 
fine.

Jonathan

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