How to use Unicode characters with Sphinx rst documents and properly generate PDF files?

Question

I discovered that if I use some Unicode characters inside .rst files, I will loose them when I convert the documentation to pdf using Sphinx.

Example chars: "șț".

When I run make latexpdf I get a document without these Unicode characters.

Answer 1

I don't know about Sphinx, but the problem seems to be in the fact that the option utf8 to inputenc doesn't know about the comma below used in Romanian.

You can solve the problem by using the utf8x option or adding to the preamble for LaTeX compilation the following incantation

\makeatletter
\ProvideTextCommandDefault\textcommabelow[1]
  {\hmode@bgroup\ooalign{\null#1\crcr\hidewidth\raise-.31ex
   \hbox{\check@mathfonts\fontsize\ssf@size\z@
   \math@fontsfalse\selectfont,}\hidewidth}\egroup}
\makeatother
\usepackage{newunicodechar}
\newunicodechar{Ș}{\textcommabelow S}
\newunicodechar{ș}{\textcommabelow s}
\newunicodechar{Ț}{\textcommabelow T}
\newunicodechar{ț}{\textcommabelow t}

The code between \makeatletter and \makeatother is from uni-global.def of the ucs package.

Answer 2

Currently You can use xelatex manually for that. Add

latex_elements = {
    'inputenc': '',
    'utf8extra': '',
    'preamble': '''

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setsansfont{Arial}
\setromanfont{Arial}
\setmonofont{DejaVu Sans Mono}
''',
}

to conf.py, make latex code, and run the xelatex manually:

sphinx-build -b latex -d _build/doctrees . _build/xetex && cd _build/xetex; xelatex *.tex