[XeTeX] newbie umlaut problems

[Michael]

Wilfred,

No, you're right, vim does default to utf-8 on my system.  The problem 
was that my XeTex source file was created by a Perl script I wrote, 
which gets its input from a MySQL DB.  My Perl script hadn't been 
handling the encoding/decoding correctly, and was writing latin1 
output.  And then I just continued to edit this file, which had been 
created by Perl, as I was tinkering with XeTex.

Indeed, if I open a new file in Vim in Ubuntu, 'fileencoding' is utf-8.

-Michael

Wilfred van Rooijen wrote:
> You're welcome.
>
> What OS do you use? O wait, I see, Ubuntu. I am surprised that VIM was set not set to UTF-8. As far as I know, most linux distributions nowadays use UTF-8 by default, but then again, maybe I am wrong.
>
> And hey, you have texlive 2009 installed. I am only at texlive 2008 - it's high time I change this :-)). 
>
> Cheers,
> Wilfred
>
> --- On Wed, 18/11/09, Michael <zontalmike at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> From: Michael <zontalmike at hotmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [XeTeX] newbie umlaut problems
>> To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
>> Date: Wednesday, 18 November, 2009, 5:56 AM
>> You were all right- my input file was
>> indeed latin1.  I was sure that it was UTF-8, but alas,
>> I was wrong.  My editor is vim, and ":set encoding"
>> returned 'utf-8', so I had checked that off early on. 
>> But deleting all the tex commands from the file and running
>> "file" on it showed that it was indeed "test.tex: ISO-8859
>> text".  I read up on the vim help, and it turns out
>> there is a more decisive variable in vim, ":set
>> fileencoding", which was still set to latin1.  I set
>> this to 'utf-8', and now it works :)
>>
>> Oh well- in the process I now have TexLive 2009 installed.
>>
>> Now I can really get started with XeTeX.  Thanks for
>> all the prompt help.
>>
>> -Michael
>>
>> Joseph Wright wrote:
>>     
>>> 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 afte
>>     
> em:
>   
>>>> "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
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>>