[OS X TeX] fontenc documentation...

[Alain Schremmer]

On Feb 1, 2009, at 11:58 AM, Herbert Schulz wrote:

> The problem is that once you get past the basic 128 character ASCII  
> set there have been multiple, INCOMPATIBLE ways of representing  
> (encoding) the extended character set; e.g., Mac Roman, Latin 1,  
> UTF-8. The last encoding is the first that seems to have universal  
> acceptance. TeX got around this problem by only using ASCII  
> characters and macros to construct accented character, etc. In  
> LaTeX the inputenc package allows for a translation from the stored  
> encoding to something LaTeX can understand.
>
> There are actually three things that must cooperate. The Editor  
> must save and read the source file in a known encoding so that it  
> can display the extended character set correctly. In TeXShop this  
> is done with a line such as
>
> %%!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode
>
> near the top of the file before saving the file (or changing the  
> default encoding to UTF-8 in TeXShop->Preferences). The second is  
> to tell LaTeX how to interpret the extended character set (i.e.,  
> understand the a certain character number means é) using a line like
>
> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
>
> for UTF-8 encoding. Finally the font you are using must have that  
> character in a certain location in the font file. To do this a line  
> like
>
> \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
>
> tells LaTeX how to map the particular input code to an actual glyph  
> to be printed with ink onto the paper. Oh, one more thing, the font  
> itself must have the character or a blank glyph will be printed;  
> e.g., the Latin Modern fonts, an extended version of Computer  
> Modern, does have the character while Computer Modern doesn't.
>
> Hope that I've got that right and it's comprehensible.

I don't know if "[you] have got that right", but this is the first  
time that the issue has been comprehensible to me

Grateful regards
--schremmer