Re: Converting German Umlauts to LaTeX

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> I write my LaTeX documents usually in emacs, that works very fine at my
> personal computer. Since I am german, I use the UTF-8 encoding. I load the
> package for UTF-8 encoding in TeX simply with /usepackage[utf-8]{inputenc},
> which really improves typing a lot (I am german, so I use frequently umlauts
> and the szlig).

> However, at the computer-terminals in our institute, they do not support
> UTF-8. LaTeX gives me an error-message, that [utf-8] is not supported
> by inputenc.

I also recommend you fix it on the TeX side, not in Emacs.
I.e. try "utf8" instead of "utf-8", or "utf8x" even (some names that I've
seen used in the past with inputenc), and if they really don't have utf-8
support in their TeX installation, then switch to latin-1, which I'm sure
they support.

> My idea was to convert the document into an UTF-8 free file.  So that all
> occurences of umlauts will be converted into the LaTeX equivalent (e.g. ö to
> "o), and I could also compile the file on the debain-boxes at our instiute.

You can do that with the iso-cvt Emacs package.  But beware that it's not
100% identical (e.g. doesn't work right in verbatim environments).


        Stefan