[OS X TeX] Input encoding question

[Gerrit Glabbart]

Am 19.02.2009 um 17:35 schrieb Nathan Paxton:

> 1.	Is one part of a master in a different encoding a problem?

Probably, yes, at least in theory: if all you ever use are those  
characters present in ASCII -- i.e., plain English --, you may not  
notice any problem. As soon as you need languages with accents (such  
as Spanish, as you seem to have found out) or umlauts or somesuch,  
you may well get undesired results. This is assuming that you call  
\usepackage{inputenc} in the preamble of you master document, and not  
in the included files seperately.


> 2.	Or does the whole master doc and all subsidiary (\include{})  
> docs need to be in the same encoding?

I'm guessing that'd be wise if you don't like to be surprised.


> 	a.	What effect could this have on those docs, assuming no other  
> changes are made?

What effect could what have on which docs?

My advice: save everything in UTF-8, and call \usepackage[utf8] 
{inputenc} in your master document's preamble. You can easily use  
TextWrangler for this, which is free (as in beer). TextWrangler has  
reasonably intuitive options for encoding, both for opening files as  
well as saving them.

Best,
Gerrit.