[OS X TeX] novice query concerning international characters

[Maarten Sneep]

Hi,

This is actually how I discovered the solution, so this is something  
you may want to refer to for unrelated problems.

On 9 okt 2008, at 22:52, Dr. Clea F. Rees wrote:

> 	\documentclass[11pt,welsh]{article}
> 	\usepackage{babel}
> 	\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
> with or without
> 	\usepackage{lmodern}
> produces the same results.
>
> I use the Welsh keyboard for input which makes it easy to type
> characters with circumflexes. That is, the 7 vowels: a, e, i, o, u, w,
> y. But using a different keyboard (e.g. US) produces the same results.
>
> Things work fine for a, e, i and u. Not so fine for the others. w  
> and y
> are not typeset at all if typed with a circumflex. (Presumbably  
> because
> OT1, T1 are missing slots for w and y circumflex.) I also get  
> console errors about o circumflex and I'm not sure why:
> 	! Package inputenc Error: Keyboard character used is undefined
> 	(inputenc)                in inputencoding `utf8'.
> 	See the inputenc package documentation for explanation.
> The output looks fine for o with a circumflex, but every occurrence
> triggers this error.

First check: Latin Modern has the characters ŷ (LATIN SMALL LETTER Y  
WITH CIRCUMFLEX, unicode 0177, utf-8 C5B7) and ŵ (LATIN SMALL LETTER W  
WITH CIRCUMFLEX, unicode 0175, utf-8 C5B5) in all shape variants.  
Sorry for shouting, this is how the character panel names them.

So it should be possible to use these characters, but perhaps the  
mapping is incorrect. This is not something I know a lot about.  
Possible solutions:

- use XeTeX, or more precisely: xelatex. This path is unicode/utf-8  
from start to finish, so there is not a lot that can mess things up.

- Access the characters directly. In trying to figure out how to do  
this, I used 'texdoc inputenc'. This opens the documentation for  
inputenc, but this only lists 8-bit encodings, not utf8. Then I  
recalled that the ucs package is a possibility. 'texdoc ucs' This  
opens a text file in the terminal, and in it I find:

Question: When I try to activate options in \usepackage[...]{ucs},
LaTeX complains about an option clash.

Answer: ucs.sty probably already got loaded via
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}. Try loading ucs.sty first or set the
options with \SetUnicodeOption.

Then I recalled that loading the utf8 encoding through ucs, requires  
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}.

Minimal test file:

\documentclass[11pt,welsh]{article}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\begin{document}
ŵŷ
\end{document}

This gives the desired results.

Maarten