Package trackchanges: problem with UTF8

Question

the package trackchanges doesn't seem to work with utf8 encoding. Did somebody encounter the same problem? Does anybody have a solution ?

Minimal example :

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} 
\usepackage{trackchanges}
\begin{document}
    text \remove{öäü}
\end{document}

The compilation error :

 ! Argument of \UTFviii@two@octets has an extra }.
<inserted text>
\par
l.6 text \remove{öäü}
I've run across a `}' that doesn't seem to match anything.

Wit oau instead of öäü, it works of course.

Answer 1

It seems that loading the package soulutf8 before trackchanges solves the problem

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} 
\usepackage{soulutf8}
\usepackage{trackchanges}
\begin{document}
    text \remove{öäü}
\end{document}

Answer 2

This seems to be an issue of the internally used soul package (Strike-Out, UnderLine) used for highlighting of the changes. It reads the content stepwise and splits the Unicode characters in two. You might find help in the soul manual.

As a workaround I would redefine the used highlighting macros, e.g. \stcolor for the given example. Here I use a simple \textcolor (from the already loaded xcolor package) instead of the soul code.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{trackchanges}
\renewcommand{\stcolor}[2]{\textcolor{#1}{#2}}
\begin{document}
    text \remove{öäü}
\end{document}

This works for me.