[tex-live] \"\i causes problems with texlive 2015

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2015-06-13 at 20:07:44 +0200, Kruschwitz Lutz wrote:

 > I have a problem with texlive 2015 that did not exist in texlive
 > 2014. The problem occurs when I am using
 > 
 > \ "{\ i}

First of all, avoid spaces after backslashes.  This cannot work (and
never did).  And "\ normalfont" cannot work either.

PLEASE provide a minimal example file which allows us to reproduce the
problems.  I assume that you are using pdflatex with the inputenc
package, but we need to know exactly what you are doing.

 > as in
 > 
 > @book {Chamisso: 2012,
 > Address = {Berlin},
 > Author = {von Chamisso, Adelbert [urspr\“unglich Louis Charles Adéla{\"{\i}}de de Chamissot de Boncourt]},
 > Publisher = {Die Andere Bibliothek},
 > Title = {journey around the world: \ normalfont with 150 lithographs by Ludwig Choris and an essayistic afterword by Matthias Glaubrecht}
 > Year = {2012}}
 
I suppose that you meant 'ursprünglich' or 'urspr\"unglich' instead of
urspr\“unglich.  I fear that the control sequence \“ isn't defined
anywhere.

 > in a BiB-entry and then run biber or biblatex. In the end I get the
 > error message
 > 
 > Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:̈ not set up for use with LaTeX.

This has nothing to do with \"\i.  Look at the disassembled excerpt of
the error message:

0063: LATIN SMALL LETTER C
0068: LATIN SMALL LETTER H
0061: LATIN SMALL LETTER A
0072: LATIN SMALL LETTER R
0020: SPACE
005C: REVERSE SOLIDUS
0075: LATIN SMALL LETTER U
0038: DIGIT EIGHT
003A: COLON
0308: COMBINING DIAERESIS
0020: SPACE
006E: LATIN SMALL LETTER N
006F: LATIN SMALL LETTER O
0074: LATIN SMALL LETTER T
0020: SPACE
0073: LATIN SMALL LETTER S
0065: LATIN SMALL LETTER E
0074: LATIN SMALL LETTER T
0020: SPACE
0075: LATIN SMALL LETTER U
0070: LATIN SMALL LETTER P

The LaTeX inputenc package complains about "COMBINING DIAERESIS".

Unicode supports several ways to describe characters.  There is a
codepoint for the character Ü, for example, but it's also possible to
compose it from the character U and the diaeresis.  The latter isn't
supported by LaTeX.  The decomposed form of a character is sometimes
needed by sorting algorithms but shouldn't be used anywhere else.

It's hard to find out which character caused the problem because your
text editor obviously displays it properly.  Your best friend is the
.log file.  The error message is preceded by a line number.

If you've located the problematic line, just remove all letters with
diaeresis and type them again.  I doubt that your text editor is the
culprit.  Did you paste bibliography entries from the internet?  This
can be the cause of such problems.

After all, I'm wondering why you don't make use of UTF-8.  Why don't
you simply type 'ursprünglich' or 'Adélaïde' on your keyboard?
LaTeX and biblatex/biber already support UTF-8.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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