[OS X TeX] Re: encoding and special characters in TexShop and BibDesk

[Herbert Schulz]

On Sep 25, 2006, at 12:45 AM, Gordon Sick wrote:

> OK, I've turned off character conversion in BibDesk. Since I use  
> the Y&Y Lucida, I've got in my preambles of my Latex files:
>
> \usepackage[LY1]{fontenc}
> \usepackage[expert,altbullet]{lucidabr}
>
> Does that mean that I'm using the LY1 font encoding? I switched one  
> of my Latex files to
> \usepackage[Latin1]{fontenc}
> but Tex complained that the package fontenc couldn't find the file  
> latin1enc.def
> Now, I'm in over my head without further help.
> ...

Howdy,

I think there is some confusion between the encoding of the font you  
want to use in your document (fontenc) and the character mapping in  
the source file you are writing (inputenc).

The input encoding (inputenc package) tells TeX what the mapping is  
between the codes in the source file; i.e., everything in the source  
file is really an eight bit number, or two or three, and TeX needs to  
know how to translate these numbers to character names (A, a, B, b,  
etc.).

The font encoding (fontenc package) is used so the TeX can tell (in  
the .dvi file or the internally in pdflatex) which shape to actually  
draw for the character name (translated into yet another set of  
numbers).

Hope I have that right! :-)

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest.com)


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