[OS X TeX] Umlauts won't print

[Richard Koch]

> On Sep 22, 2015, at 2:07 PM, Justin C. Walker <justin at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> This is just an untested thought, but it is possible that the accented ‘o’ is being suppressed in the source view by the TeXShop editor.  Two things to try are:
> - in TeXShop, Source->Show Invisible Characters might make it show up; or
> - in emacs, if you can handle it, you can see everything in the file, so if the character in some form is there, it will show up
> 

A comment on this thought. Internally, TeXShop is a Unicode editor. Thus if you
insert an umlaud or an accented o, you will get those characters. Indeed, if you
insert Arabic, you will get Arabic, written backward. If you insert Chinese, you get Chinese.

Line feeds and tabs don’t have characters to display. But  TeXShop has a command called “Show Invisible
Characters” to make them visible.

Situations when the output display don’t show umlauts are usually related to
the coding used to read and write files. The common choices are

	Western (ISO Latin 9)
	UTF-8
	Mac OS Roman

Originally, TeX only accepted ASCII input, and the default TeXShop encoding was Mac OS Roman. More recently it has been ISO Latin 9,
suitable for Western Europe; this is ISO Latin 1 with the addition of a Euro symbol.

The best choice is UTF-8, which preserves all Unicode, provided you can deal with the
issues of getting your TeX engine to accept this input.

Dick Koch