[texhax] Latvian Special Characters

[Pascal]

Am Monday, den 17.03.2014, 01:59 +0100 schrieb Reinhard Kotucha:
> On 2014-03-16 at 19:11:28 +0100, Pascal wrote:
> 
>  > Hi all, 
>  > 
>  > in my master thesis I need to use some special Latvian characters.
> Since
>  > I'm writing the document in German I use the babel ngerman package
> in
>  > the preamble.
>  > 
>  > For most special characters that works, but I hit upon a quite
> specific
>  > g, I could not get "diplayed" correctly so far: ģ
>  > 
>  > The technical specifications for this letter are:
>  > UTF-8: 0xC4 0xA3
>  > UTF-16: 0x0123
>  > C oktal dargestelltes UTF-8: \304\243
>  > XML-Dezimal-Entität: ģ 
>  > 
>  > 
>  > I came upon this website (http://home.lu.lv/~drikis/TeX/) which
> provides
>  > "commands" for Latvian letters, but this g it does not work, and
> since I
>  > do not understand Latvian, I miss the instructions on how to set up
> the
>  > LaTeX environment in order for the "commands" to work properly.
>  > 
>  > Here is a minimal example where the ģ is not displayed correctly:
>  > 
>  > \documentclass{scrreprt}
>  > \usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
>  > \usepackage[ansinew]{inputenc}
>  > \usepackage{lmodern}
> 
> I wrote a few lines about typesetting multilingual documents with
> 8-bit TeX engines.  Run
> 
>   texdoc vntex
> 
> and see the example on page 4 (Vietnamese and Russian).
> 
> I don't know whether babel supports Latvian.  But I strongly recommend
> to use a Unicode-aware TeX engine (XeTeX or LuaTeX).  You don't have
> to select another language or encoding. Just type ģ on your keyboard
> and ģ wil appear in the PDF file.  Of course, you have to use a font
> wich supports ģ.


Thanks Reinhard & Daniel for the quicks answers.

I forgot to mention that I use pdflatex for compiling the document and
for fonts I use lmodern & mathpazo. Using luatex or xelatex which are
both installed on my Linux system gives me errors with UTF-8 strings for
German and Latvian characters, although I guess this can be solved by
replacing them with UTF-8 characters via input encoding. I'll see
whether I will have time to fix this issue (this would mean replacing
several hundred characters in my document, still a hassle even if using
a LaTeX-editor) or just leave it at the incorrect g. My reviewers won't
even notice :-D


Anyway thanks for your tipps,

Pascal