[pdftex] How to handle different tex encoding files?

[Jaime E. Villate]

This question is off-topic in this list (pdftex); in any case, here
goes an answer, with apologies to the list.

On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 13:35 -0800, Gengis Kanhg Toledo Ramírez wrote:
> Yesterday I copy text from a PDF and paste it to one
> latex file. When I tried to save the file with emacs it ask me about
> bad encoding, so I should select one encoding from a list. I pause
> the saving opperation and search the web for "what to do?", I didn't
> find any help so I had to decide, so I select "emacs-mule" encoding
> (mule=Multi Language encoding)

that was a mistake. You should have selected latin-1-unix.
You can correct the problem easily: open the file again with Emacs
and follow this sequence of menus:
  Options -> Mule -> Set Coding System -> For Saving this Buffer
or, if you are an Emacs purist:
  C-x RET f
then, write down latin-1-unix
You will notice that ** appears in the status bar, indicating that the
buffer has been changed and needs to be saved again.

How did I know that you had to use latin 1? because according to
the error message, you might have \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
in your preamble. Notice that it is now recommended to move into
UTF8 which is more general. To do that you can use
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc] an save all your files in UTF8. An easier
way to convert to a different encoding, without having to open
the file with Emacs, is using the program iconv.

Regards,
Jaime Villate

P.S. congratulations on your thesis, I'm very interested in Maglev.