Re: Converting German Umlauts to LaTeX

[Christian Herenz <herenz@physik.hu-berlin.de>]

Wilfred Zegwaard (privé) schrieb:
> In LaTeX it is usual that you use the TeX side of it.
>
> So it is not: ä, but \"a.
>
> If you don't like that you can load additional codepackages where you
> can use ä. But if you use XeTeX or to Germany adapted LaTeX
> distributions (with EMacs), these problems are solved.
As I said, at home everything works fine, cause I had the choice to
install a LaTeX distribution which fits my needs  (openSUSE implements a
lot of packages for LaTeX in their distribution). And yes, I don't like
typing \"a instead of ä, because that somewhat slows down my workflow.
Another Problem here is, that the emacs interprets the " by default in
TeX mode as quotes, and changes them into '', which will not interpreted
as an umlaut anymore. Of course, this behaviour is changeable, but I
think that it is not "so cool" that this behaviour is default.

The Problem which started this thread, was indeed that the package for
UTF8 encoding was not available on one of the two systems where I have
to work on my document. Unfortunately this system is in an environment,
where I only have normal user acsess to the system, and I have no
influence on the system wide installed packages nor the LaTeX distribution.

However, it was also mentioned earlier in this thread that I could solve
the problem with an local copy of the file "utf8.def". I have not tested
this, but it should work.

What I have tested, and that worked for me and I think it is a good
solution is to save the file in emacs as Latin9 encoded. Then I use
\usepackage{inputenc}[latin9] and I can type my umlauts at home and at
the university terminals as I like them to type.

There was also a nice snippet for my .emacs send to me, which was not
postet to this list. This is really great, since emacs saves TeX-files
automatically as Latin9 encoded, when this is inserted into .emacs.

    (setq file-coding-system-alist
      (append
        '(("\\.tex\\'" iso-latin-9-unix . iso-latin-9-unix))
    ;    '(("\\.el\\'"  iso-latin-9-unix . iso-latin-9-unix))
        file-coding-system-alist))

I already forwarded it to this list, but I think something went wrong so
it did not appear here in this thread. Thats why I am posting this again.

> Check out the TeXlive distibution. There is documentation about using
> TeXLive with EMacs and German there. There is sufficient documentation
> about using german codepages with LaTeX at the German TeX users group.
> A list of codepages for EMacs / LaTeX can be found in several
> distributions.
Thank you, I will have a look at it.

Regards,
Christian