[OS X TeX] encoding and special characters in TexShop

[Piet van Oostrum]

>>>>> Bruno Voisin <bvoisin at mac.com> (BV) wrote:

>BV> I can't see why, as soon as you write in another language than plain
>BV> English, you would wish to have ü replaced automatically by \"u and  so
>BV> forth. You can't get proper hyphenation this way. To get proper
>BV> hyphenation you need:

That is just plain false.

>BV> - To make TeX understand your non-ASCII keystrokes, using the  inputenc
>BV> package with the appropriate option ([latin1] or [applemac]  in most
>BV> cases).

That is just plain false. Every time you see this false statement popping
up. The input encoding has nothing to do with hyphenation.

>BV> - To make TeX use fonts that include these non-ASCII characters  natively,
>BV> either using the fontenc package with the [LY1] option, or  the fontenc
>BV> package with the [T1] option plus the textcomp package.  With Computer
>BV> Modern fonts, that implies, in addition, either  installing the CM-Super
>BV> fonts or using the lmodern package .

That is right. To get hyphenation with accented characters you neeed a font
that contains these characters.

>BV> - To make take use the proper hyphenation pattern, most likely by  using
>BV> the babel package with the appropriate language option (here  [german]).

Right.

>BV> As soon as an accented character is entered through control  sequences, \"u
>BV> say, you won't get proper hyphenation. Without the  babel package, any word
>BV> containing \"u won't be hyphenated at all  (TeX won't consider it as a
>BV> word). With the babel package, both  portions of the word before \"u and
>BV> after \"u will be hyphenated  independently. But in order to get proper
>BV> hyphenation, you really  needs all the steps above.

False. If you use for example \usepackage[latin1]{fontenc} (or one of the
others with accented characters, LaTeX translates \"u to the single
character ü in the proper font encoding. Therefore hyphenation works
regardless whether you use \"u or ü in the input. The statement about babel
is only valid when you use [OT1] fontenconding.
-- 
Piet van Oostrum <piet at cs.uu.nl>
URL: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~piet [PGP 8DAE142BE17999C4]
Private email: piet at vanoostrum.org
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