[OS X TeX] Input encoding question

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 19.02.2009 um 18:20 schrieb Nathan Paxton:

> In the chapter, there's a lot of stuff that's quoted in or cut-and- 
> pasted from Spanish, and the originals have lots of accented  
> characters (á and other vowels, for example).

This text is probably not UTF-8, rather more simple Latin-1 (ISO  
8859-1) or Latin-9 (ISO 8859-15), which can be used in LaTeX via

	\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
	\usepackage[latin9]{inputenc}

and it might also work with

	\usepackage[applemac]{inputenc}

because MacRoman ("Western Latin Mac") was intended to support U.S.  
ASCII and the Latin scripts used in Latin America and Europe. All  
three variants should not need changes in the files since the U.S.  
ASCII block, i.e., the non-accented characters, is the same for all.

If you had a version of GNU Emacs available (there is always the  
simple Apple version available which only runs in Terminal) you could  
open that file with Spanish accents and try to save it in another  
encoding. GNU Emacs will warn you if it can't convert from A to B.  
Then you could test encoding C ...


To learn a bit about input encodings, try on the command line:

	texdoc -l input

and choose *a few* documents for reading (the two inputenc.pdf plus  
selinput.pdf at least).


> Under the default encoding, pdflatex is unhappy and spits back an  
> error, but under UTF-8, pdflatex is as happy as a clam. I've  
> written the other parts of the dissertation (three chapters) in  
> Western Latin Mac. Is anything terrible going to happen (to the  
> best of your guessing) if I save just this chapter in UTF-8, as a  
> subsidiary of the master doc?


As others mentioned, it will lead to interesting results when you mix  
file encodings.

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   Pete

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