Uppercase accented characters displayed as "?"

Question

The header is

\documentclass[12pt,twoside]{report}
\usepackage[a4paper,left=4cm,right=3cm]{geometry}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[francais]{babel}

\begin{document}
MÈRE
\end{document}

In the TeX file, for example when I write é it is well displayed in the pdf output file, but É is displayed as "?". Why? Yet the character É is well supported by the encoding T1 (for fontenc). The problem seems to be only with uppercase accented characters.

The problem also seems to be from latin1 of the package inputenc. I tried utf8 instead of latin1 but it does not match.

NB: I know the alternative \'E and it work well, but I want to write the character directly as É.

EDIT: with the above header everything works fine on my Windows 7 PC, the problem only on my Windows XP one.

Answer 1

As David Carlisle said, it must work with pdflatex as well. Probably you editor uses utf8 by default, and the declared input encoding and the real one must coincide. So declareutf8 encoding and use the Latin Modern fonts (don't load fontenc in that case, since the lmodern package does it for you):

\documentclass[12pt,twoside]{report}
\usepackage[a4paper,left=4cm,right=3cm]{geometry}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
%\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage[francais]{babel}

\begin{document}
MÈRE
\end{document} 

Answer 2

You need to use XeTeX.

you can compile this MWE with xelatex command:

\documentclass[12pt,twoside]{report}
\usepackage[a4paper,left=4cm,right=3cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage[francais]{babel}

\begin{document}

ALLONS MANGER GRAND-MÈRE.

ALLONS MANGER, GRAND-MÈRE.

\end{document}

So you will get a fine output.