Using TeX with dropbox on multiple platforms: encoding issues

Question

I use TeX on my laptop (OS X) and on my workstation (Linux RHEL 6) and I have issues with the encoding of some files where I use accents (mostly in authors names, but also because I'm French and I have some documents in French). I guess my issues is that I sometimes rely on the more flexible encoding on the Mac side to use accented characters directly like é instead of doing {\'{e}} for example. Then through Dropbox, or maybe because I then open these files on UNIX, these accents get mangled differently on both sides, and I obtain 2 different looking files on both sides. I'm pretty sure I could fix all this by using only the escape way but I might be able to do something more elegant (maybe I need to explicitly set the encoding both in the .tex file and in vi). I'm not sure what happens if I go to another editor then like TeXshop...

Do you have some pointers or a more elegant solution to my problem? Let me know if you need more information ! Thanks !

UPDATE: Thanks to some of the pointers given, I know a little bit more about the issues now. I created a small sample file to reproduce the issue. If I create it in TeXShop, it seems to work fine whereas the issue exists if I create the file with vim. Additionally, the file --mime-encoding test.tex yields different output depending on the way of creating the file: { $ file --mime-encoding test.tex test.tex: unknown-8bit $ file --mime-encoding test2.tex test2.tex: utf-8 } { kheldar@shadowfax /Users/kheldar/Dropbox/Boulot/CV/csuros/2011 $ vi test.tex kheldar@shadowfax /Users/kheldar/Dropbox/Boulot/CV/csuros/2011 $ vi test2.tex

\documentclass[11pt]{article} \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \begin{document} \title{Test encoding} \maketitle

Test accents: é è ê ë

\begin{verbatim} Test accents: é è ê ë \end{verbatim}

Test accents: \'{e} `{e} \"{e}

\begin{verbatim} Test accents: \'{e} `{e} \"{e} \end{verbatim}

\end{document} } Note that even with the TeXShop created file with utf-8, I don't see utf-8 in the status bar described by @Daniel. So it must be my vimrc right? Somehow I have other options that interfere with the set filencoding command. Any idea?

Answer 1

The two most important pieces of advice:

• Use utf8 for the encoding of your documents (\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}). In vim you set this encoding by set filencoding=utf8; depending on your shell's locale settings (locale) this might already be the default. In TexShop, you have to set the file encoding explicitly in the preferences.

• Refrain from using accented characters in your file names! MacOS's "special" interpretation of UTF8 in filenames (they are stored in decomposed form) causes all sorts of troubles.

For vim it is furthermore a good idea to define a status line that shows indicators for the actual text encoding and line-ending encoding (if you put the following lines into you ~/.vimrc the file type, line ending and text encoding is shown on the right):

" show statusline
hi StatusLine ctermbg=black ctermfg=white guibg=black guifg=white gui=none
hi EMPH ctermfg=yellow ctermbg=black guibg=black guifg=yellow gui=none
set statusline=%F\ \|%c,%l:\ 0x%-02B\|%=\ \|%{strftime(\"%c\",getftime(expand(\"%:p\")))}\|\ %y\ %{&ff}\ %#EMPH#%{(&fenc==\"\"?&enc:&fenc)}
set ls=2

Thereby, you can quickly grasp if the encoding is right. If you google for "vim statusline" you will find a pretoria of guides and tutorials how to setup a good status line. Mine is still relatively simple.