[XeTeX] newbie umlaut problems

[Joseph Wright]

Michael wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm just starting out with xetex, and I'm struggling to get out of the 
> blocks.  I'm having a problem getting German characters to appear 
> correctly in my pdf.
> 
> I'm using Ubuntu 8.10, I started out installing only the TexLive 
> packages which sounded relevant, but since then I've installed the 
> package "texlive-full", v 2007.dfsg.1-2.
> 
> Below, you can see my input file, the output from my command line when 
> processing this, and an excerpt from the log file.  I chose Verdana for 
> now just because "fc-list" lists it as one of the available fonts:  The 
> output looks like the German characters got swallowed along with the 3 
> characters after them:
> 
> "Here are some German words: sch    f   t, M    sterreich, Spa  "
> 
> I'd appreciate any advice.
> 
> -Michael
> 
> 
> %% START FILE
> \title{My book}
> 
> \author{Me}
> 
> \documentclass{article}
> \usepackage{fontspec}
> \usepackage{xunicode}
> \usepackage{xltxtra}
> 
> \setmainfont{Verdana}
> 
> \begin{document}
> \section{Section One}
> 
> \subsection{ Sunday }
> \fontspec{Verdana}
> \par Here are some German words: schön, fährt, Müll, Österreich, Spaß.
> \end{document}
> %% END FILE

You did save the file in UTF8, I assume: which editor do you use? TeX 
Live 2007 contains a *very old* version of XeTeX. If you are prepared to 
install it outside of the Ubuntu package system, TeX Live 2009 was 
recently released with an up-to-date XeTeX.
--
Joseph Wright