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My document is in in dutch and there are quite a few letters with diaeresis in it. I have this on top of my document:

\usepackage[dutch]{babel}

I thought this would fix the language-problem but every letter with a diaeresis in it is left out. Any ideas how to enable those? It's mostly ï's and ë's.

2 Answers 2

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babel doesn't allow you to input foreign characters (foreign to English) directly; it simply loads the appropriate hyphenation patterns and translates some predefined names (and possibly defines some shorthands).

You need to load the inputenc package with an appropriate package option (typically, the utf8 option) in order to directly typeset such characters (check that the chosen option matches the encoding for your editor); another package that you surely will want to load is fontenc with Cork encoding.

Without inputenc you can still produce the dieresis by using \".

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[dutch]{babel}

\begin{document}

\"A\"E\"I\"O\"U\"a\"e\"i\"o\"u

ÄËÏÖÜäëïöü


\end{document}

enter image description here

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Same as before, but with a note about character encodings.

If you choose to stick with the UTF-8 encoding, you're on a good way, but read this discussion about utf8 vs. utf8x for better results.

If you prefer to type your characters in the Windows manner (that is, ISO-8858-1 or latin1 or CP1252), you'll need to insert something like \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}, which is fine except for some special characters and ligatures like œ (I mean \oe). Beware with this : typing œ in your source files could be a source of confusion, since the ISO-8859-15 and CP1252 encodings are (partially) incompatible. After some testing, you could perhaps use \usepackage[cp1252]{inputenc}.

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  • Actually, latin1 and cp1252 are different encodings. In Windows, use cp1252. Sep 7, 2012 at 16:19

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