[XeTeX] UTF8 and XeTeX?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 19 Jul 2007, at 2:11 am, Thomas Hühn wrote:

> Hi
>
> I'm writing a source file in UTF8 and don't understand how to make  
> XeTeX
> process it.
>
> Here is a minimal example:
>
> \documentclass{article}
> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
> \begin{document}
> Hällo
> \end{document}

For xetex, do *not* use \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}, because this  
tries to interpret the individual bytes of UTF-8 characters via TeX  
macros. But xetex already handles the UTF-8 encoding itself and works  
with the actual Unicode character values.

Therefore,

	\documentclass{article}
	\begin{document}
	Hällo
	\end{document}

will run without the error message; but the ä will be missing from  
the output because that Unicode character is not present in Computer  
Modern. So you also need to choose a Unicode font; use fontspec to do  
this:

	\documentclass{article}
	\usepackage{fontspec}
	\setmainfont{Times Roman} % or whatever...
	\begin{document}
	Hällo
	\end{document}

If you simply load the fontspec package but don't specify a font, it  
will load Latin Modern, which looks like Computer Modern but includes  
many more characters (encoded according to Unicode), so that should  
also work.

JK