[OS X TeX] What encoding should I use?

[Johan Almqvist]

On May 28, 2005, at 10:37, Peter Dyballa wrote:
> Am 28.05.2005 um 01:14 schrieb Friedrich Vosberg:
>> I'm using MacOSRoman since years. I think it would be more  
>> compatibel if I would use UTF-8 (or somewhat in that kind). How  
>> can I switch my whole TeX-system including all templates, sty- and  
>> lco-files etc. completely to that encoding (by one click ;-)?
>>
>> Does it make sense?
> Not yet! TeX still can't use UTF-8, is resticted to 8 bit short  
> characters. Dominik Unruh's Unicode package enables the use of  
> UTF-8 in a TeX document, but makes it unusable at places without  
> this add-on. Only XeTeX, still restricted to Mac OS X, uses UTF-8  
> natively.

I don't see this? I use \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} and everything  
works fine (I use it basically because I am writing in English, and  
have Swedish, Norwegian and Serbo-Croatian names in my text (inluding  
BibTeX) -- which problems would I have? And as opposed to MacOSRoman,  
utf-8 is portable.

> Going away from MacRoman disables the use of any Carbon Emacs.  
> They're only good when using Mac encodings.

OK I don't use Emacs, I mostly use TeXShop and TextWrangler.

> A droplet that uses recode can do the conversion for you, if you  
> want to stay away from the command line, but probably there are too  
> some other and real Mac OS X applications for that use.

Regarding the actual conversion, I don't think there is much work to  
do. All 'normal' TeX files that are installed by the packages are 7- 
bit clean anyway, so it'd just be the files you have created yourself.

-Johan
-- 
Johan Almqvist
johan at almqvist.net

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