[OS X TeX] French letters do not print

[Winfried Zettelmeyer]

Bruno, Jose Figueroa, Jean-Claude,
to close this thread properly, THANK YOU for your advice, it works  
like a charm with the french text now (and I learned a lot)!!
Best regards
Winfried

On 17 Feb 2006, at 18:47, Bruno Voisin wrote:

Le 17 févr. 06 à 18:09, Winfried Zettelmeyer a écrit :

> What do I have to add to the following file ?
>
> \documentclass[10pt,a4paper,notitlepage,oneside,openany]{book}
\usepackage[applemac]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{textcomp}
\usepackage{lmodern}
> \usepackage[english,frenchb]{babel}
> \begin{document}
> \selectlanguage{frenchb}
> \chapter{Une génération après}
> \end{document}

The [applemac] option to the inputenc package assumes you're using  
the Mac OS Roman encoding in your text editor (for example TeXShop).  
Other popular choices are ISO Latin 1, yielding the [latin1] option,  
and Windows Latin 1, yielding the [ansinew] option.

The lmodern package (implying you are using the PostScript Latin  
Modern fonts) is not strictly necessary, but will produce better  
output. Without it, you are using either the bitmap EC (European  
Computer Modern) fonts, which look bad on screen but nice on print,  
or the PostScript CM-Super fonts which require an additional  
installation (there is an i-Package for them, but they are huge).

With the Latin Modern fonts, an alternative to:

	\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
	\usepackage{textcomp}

is

	\usepackage[LY1]{fontenc}

I personally favour the latter.

What this all does:

- inputenc: allows direct use of accented letters in the input file  
(including, if your keyboard includes accented keys -- as does my  
French keyboard --, direct use of these keys).

- fontenc and textcomp: allows use of 8-bit fonts, containing  
accented characters natively; this is a requirement for proper  
hyphenation (babel includes a workaround for this, but it is not  
perfect).

In case you're looking for details: TeX can't hyphenate words  
including control sequences, such as \'e for é. Hence, it can't  
hyphenate words containing accents, with the default 7-bit Computer  
Modern fonts. babel works around this limitation, by allowing each  
part of a word containing a control sequence (namely, before and  
after the control sequence) to be traeted and hyphenated separately.

Still, that will not catch all the proper hyphenation points. With an  
8-bit font the letter é becomes a simple glyph é to TeX, not  
requiring any control sequence; a word containing this é will be  
recognized as a proper word, and hyphenation will become correct.

> My attempts to download inputenc.dtx for more information from CTAN  
> are rejected ("You do not have permission to open this page")
> How to get access ?

No need for this, the doc is installed at /Library/teTeX/share/ 
texmf.tetex/doc/latex/base/inputenc.dvi.

Bruno Voisin------------------------- Info --------------------------
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------------------------- Info --------------------------
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