[texhax] Problem with French composition

[William Adams]

On Aug 23, 2009, at 6:54 AM, Jacques Goldman wrote:

> I'm new to Tex. I've downloaded the MacTex distribution.
> All was OK so far.
> I tried the example shown in the "Red me First " document. OK So far
> After that I tried some sentences in french tthus containing é, è ù  
> and accented letters.
> Unfortunately those letters have disapeared in the output text. I  
> mean a word like "où" or "désespérément" results in "o" and  
> "dsprment' in the output.
> Could you tell me how to fix that problem? I suppose that MacTex  
> Latex is language free and accept any language.
> I also change some encoding schemes but with no succes.
>
> In advance thanks for help


John Culleton's note:
>> Use of the actual accented character in your .tex file is likely to
>> fail. Only characters in the ASCII character set should be used in
>> your source file.

Only applies if one wishes to limit oneself to working w/ Plain TeX in  
an unchanged version.

For LaTeX one would do something like:

\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage[applemac]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[frenchb]{babel}
\begin{document}

désespérément

é,
è ù

\end{document}

or if one wishes to stick to Plain TeX one could use xetex which would  
allow direct handling of UTF8 input.

William


-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.