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This article claims that "LaTeX supports Unicode". Does it now? Can you just drop in encoded characters from any language your fonts support, and get them rende
by rspeer 12y ago
This article claims that "LaTeX supports Unicode". Does it now? Can you just drop in encoded characters from any language your fonts support, and get them rendered correctly? That would be a huge breakthrough, and last I knew, this is not at all the case.
LaTeX supports rendering various kinds of diacritics and math symbols, through its own mechanisms that aren't Unicode. If you want Unicode, you need to use a separate project called XeTeX. XeTeX's home page [1] introduces it as "Unicode-based TeX".
[1] http://xetex.sourceforge.net/ http://xetex.sourceforge.net/
- qznc 12y agoIt works for stuff like äöü. It does not work with math mode stuff like \sum. For UTF-8 write into the preamble: \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
- Derbasti 12y agoYou are talking about pdflatex, which is the default latex compiler in many LaTeX distributions. Most distributions also ship xelatex, which is the LaTeX compiler of the XeTeX project. XeTeX and xelatex indeed do support all the wondrous diacritics and Klingon symbols of unicode fonts (TTF or OTF, no less). However, LaTeX math still has to be written with \LaTeX symbols in order for the math engine to lay out symbols correctly. After all, a \sum is conceptually a different thing than a \Sigma. You can easily type your Euro Signs, typographic quotes, or Klingon symbols as unicode, though. By the way, lualatex, from the LuaTeX project, behaves the same, although somewhat slower and infinitely scriptable in Lua.