[texhax] Problem with French composition

[John Culleton]

On Sunday 23 August 2009 06:54:56 Jacques Goldman wrote:
> Hello,
>
> 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
>
> Jacques Goldman
> Bankstraat 30
> B-3078 Everberg
> tel: +32 2 759 96 51
> gsm: +32 476 24 30 55
> Skype: chrysandre

AFAIK there are two ways to get an accented letter in TeX. The first 
is to use the accent mark followed by the letter thus:
\`el\'eve. 

The second is to identify the placement of the accented form of the 
character on the font chart and use the \char(number) command. Both 
methods are covered in the TeXBook. 

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. 


-- 
John Culleton
Able Indexers and Typesetters