[OS X TeX] encoding and special characters in TexShop

[Alex Hamann]

Am 17.09.2006 um 12:10 schrieb Robert Spence:

>
> On 17 Sep 2006, at 09:36 , Alex Hamann wrote:
>
>>
>> Am 14.09.2006 um 11:50 schrieb Bruno Voisin:
>>
>>> Le 14 sept. 06 à 11:08, Alex Hamann a écrit :
>>>
>>>> 1. Encoding:
>>>> when choosing a given way of encoding my tex documents can that  
>>>> make calling the inputenc package obsolet?
>>>> to be precise: can I not call the inputenc package when encoding  
>>>> a german document with isolatin?
>>>
>>> No, you must call it (with option [latin1] in your case).  
>>> Otherwise LaTeX won't know what to do with your non-ASCII input.  
>>> See, for ISO Latin 1, the file /Library/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/ 
>>> tex/latex/base/latin1.def which tells LaTeX, when calling  
>>> inputenc, how to interpret your non-ASCII input.
>>>
>> Works fine but only when calling the [applemac].
>>  [latin1] leeds to the following problem:
>>
>> ! Package inputenc Error: Keyboard character used is undefined
>> (inputenc)                in inputencoding `latin1'.
>>
>> why is this so? I thought latin1 and applemac were interchangable  
>> on a mac.
>
> No no! They're quite different!  [latin1] is ISO 8859-1, which  
> works OK for most Western European languages, and is probably what  
> your collaborators are using under Windows (if that's what they're  
> using) and which they may be using under Linux (or under Mac OS,  
> now that it's Mac OS X).  [applemac] is the Macintosh (standard,  
> i.e. not Central European) encoding, which you'll only really find  
> useful on a Mac; there's no real reason to keep on using it unless  
> you have old documents created, say, under Mac OS 9 or earlier.   
> Which text editor are you using to create your own input text, and  
> which encoding is it set to by default?  If it's set to "Western  
> (Mac OS Roman)", i.e. the Macintosh (standard) encoding, then  
> you'll always need \usepackage[applemac]{inputenc} in your  
> preamble.  But what text editors do your collaborators use, on  
> which platform?
>
> Any chance of persuading everyone to work in UTF-8 encoding, as  
> Bruno suggested?
>

Ok, got that. Thank you and Peter Dyballa for the replies. Indeed I  
had been using TexShop set to use Mac OS Roman (although I am trying  
to figure out if I should try to learn using Aquamacs... or maybe  
turn to iTexMac... maybe somebody can give me some advice on the  
advantages and disavantages of the three in a new thread?)
Probably there is little hope to convince my collaborators to use  
anything else than Word ... consider myself the most experienced when  
it comes to Tex (and if you have read the types of questions I´ve  
been asking on that list you get the idea what that means...)
Thanks again for the clarification, I will have to trash some tex- 
tutorials that gave me the wrong idea about the inputnec-options.

Alex

>>> An alternative is to switch to XeTeX, which expects UTF-8 input  
>>> natively: you just have to select UTF-8 encoding in TeXShop, and  
>>> XeTeX will process your input text directly without needing any  
>>> dedicated LaTeX package to do so.
>
> A quick search of my bulging mailboxes showed that Peter Dyballa,  
> on the XeTeX list, discussed some ways of converting the input  
> encoding of .tex files, using (of course) Emacs, back on 11 Jul 2006
> (Subject line was
> Re: [XeTeX] Converting legacy encodings to utf-8
> ),
> and then there was a thread started back on 13 Jan 2006 by Bastian  
> Philipps
> (Subject line was
> [OS X TeX] Suggestions about input encoding - utf-8, latin1, latin9??
> ),
> which referred to an earlier thread entitled "Textencoding MacOS  
> Roman vs UTF-8".
>
> It might be a good idea to make an extra set of backups of all your  
> files before starting to play around with converting them from one  
> encoding to another.
> ;-)
>
> Good luck...
>
> -- Rob Spence------------------------- Info --------------------------
> Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
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>

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