[XeTeX] newbie umlaut problems

[Michael]

You were all right- my input file was indeed latin1.  I was sure that it 
was UTF-8, but alas, I was wrong.  My editor is vim, and ":set encoding" 
returned 'utf-8', so I had checked that off early on.  But deleting all 
the tex commands from the file and running "file" on it showed that it 
was indeed "test.tex: ISO-8859 text".  I read up on the vim help, and it 
turns out there is a more decisive variable in vim, ":set fileencoding", 
which was still set to latin1.  I set this to 'utf-8', and now it works :)

Oh well- in the process I now have TexLive 2009 installed.

Now I can really get started with XeTeX.  Thanks for all the prompt help.

-Michael

Joseph Wright wrote:
> Michael wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm just starting out with xetex, and I'm struggling to get out of 
>> the blocks.  I'm having a problem getting German characters to appear 
>> correctly in my pdf.
>>
>> I'm using Ubuntu 8.10, I started out installing only the TexLive 
>> packages which sounded relevant, but since then I've installed the 
>> package "texlive-full", v 2007.dfsg.1-2.
>>
>> Below, you can see my input file, the output from my command line 
>> when processing this, and an excerpt from the log file.  I chose 
>> Verdana for now just because "fc-list" lists it as one of the 
>> available fonts:  The output looks like the German characters got 
>> swallowed along with the 3 characters after them:
>>
>> "Here are some German words: sch    f   t, M    sterreich, Spa  "
>>
>> I'd appreciate any advice.
>>
>> -Michael
>>
>>
>> %% START FILE
>> \title{My book}
>>
>> \author{Me}
>>
>> \documentclass{article}
>> \usepackage{fontspec}
>> \usepackage{xunicode}
>> \usepackage{xltxtra}
>>
>> \setmainfont{Verdana}
>>
>> \begin{document}
>> \section{Section One}
>>
>> \subsection{ Sunday }
>> \fontspec{Verdana}
>> \par Here are some German words: schön, fährt, Müll, Österreich, Spaß.
>> \end{document}
>> %% END FILE
>
> You did save the file in UTF8, I assume: which editor do you use? TeX 
> Live 2007 contains a *very old* version of XeTeX. If you are prepared 
> to install it outside of the Ubuntu package system, TeX Live 2009 was 
> recently released with an up-to-date XeTeX.
> -- 
> Joseph Wright
>
>