Re: Documentation (was Re: [OS X TeX] Kanbun (漢文) and French...)

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

On lundi 05 janv. 09, at 02:27, Martin Costabel wrote:

> Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
>> Thank you Herb and Martin for confirming that however trivial the  
>> thing is, it is not documented anywhere I looked (which includes  
>> French "beginners" "introductions" etc. to Latex).
>
> From a link you gave erlier
> <http://www.laas.fr/~matthieu/cours/latex2e/>
> page 23, in the section about « support multilingue » :
>
> « Les systèmes informatiques modernes vous permettent de saisir  
> directement
> les caractères accentués ou les symboles spécifiques d’une langue.
> Depuis la version de décembre 1994, LATEX2" sait gérer ce type de  
> codage
> grâce à l’extension inputenc :
> \usepackage[codage]{inputenc} »

And as I wrote earlier, this same document wrote that I could use  
French quotation marks by simply typing them when I could not.

Besides, from what I eventually learned here, XeteX does not use  
inputenc. And my need for Unicode made me consider XeteX. After  
spending much time with Texshop trying to figure out why I could not  
get my accents...

>> To Martin: I don't see why I'd first consider Latin-1 as an option  
>> for my work because I know fully well that Japanese is not encoded  
>> in Latin-1.
>
> Sure, but you started exaggerating.

No, I started wasting 2 days looking for information when I saw that  
the "introductions", "templates" and "tutorials" did not produce the  
expected results at all.

> Plus, as Herb wrote, you can use utf8 as input encoding, too. I  
> mentioned latin1, because this is what I have been using for many  
> years (I write all my paper letters, English, French, German, and  
> occasionally Italian or Spanish, in LaTeX).

And I have used UTF-8 a soon as I could because I need to write in  
Japanese, French and English. And that is the working default on OSX.  
Why I need 2gb of software to have to set fonts and encodings myself  
is such a regression it defeats the imagination. And I am not  
exagerating.





Jean-Christophe Helary