[XeTeX] Using Xetex on GNU/linux.

[Jonathan Kew]

On 7 Jan 2010, at 13:10, Chris Jones wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 11:36:22PM EST, Andrew Moschou wrote:
>> What if you use the 'xelatex' command instead of 'xetex'?
> 
> Thanks, that was it. 
> 
> Now it works for for 7bit-ascii.
> 
> I looked for existing samples and tried a French document that compiled
> OK with latex, after I removed a \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc} statement.
> But I noticed that every character beyond U+007F had silently vanished
> from the resulting sample.pdf: 'idée' had become 'ide', and so on. 
> 
> I then tried an Spanish sample, and likewise, 'computación' lost the
> accented 'o' and became 'computacin', etc.

It sounds like you didn't select a font that supports those characters. The default LaTeX fonts (Computer Modern) don't have them. In traditional LaTeX, with inputenc and fontenc, they're constructed using \accent commands, etc., but if you want to use xetex's native Unicode support, you should forget about those and instead select a font that has the Unicode characters you're using.

The best way to do this is generally using the fontspec package; see its documentation for more information. Actually, even just loading fontspec, with no additional options, may be enough to make those characters reappear, as I believe it will change the default from Computer Modern to Latin Modern, which looks the same but has a much richer character set.

(BTW, if you have \tracinglostchars=1, there should be warnings in your .log file telling you about characters that are not available in the current font.)

JK